Emily Johnston de Forest - benefactor of New York Metropolitan Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen

Much attention has been given to Robert W de Forest (1848-1931) for his extraordinary philanthropic activities, the most significant of which in this context is the gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the American Wing (see pp. 176-181). Yet it is to his wife, Emily Johnston de Forest (Fig. 1), that credit can be given for igniting an interest in early American objects that led to the creation of the wing. [1] An indefatigable collector, she made gifts to the museum and the American Wing that deserve long overdue recognition.

Emily de Forest was born into a highly cultured family. She was the daughter 0f Frances Colles Johnston and John Taylor Johnston (1820-1893), a railroad executive who collected not only French academic painting but patronized living American artists. His holdings included works by Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, John Frederick Kensett, and Winslow Homer. [2] Emily Johnston accompanied her parents on their extended travels abroad, which exposed her to the arts and crafts of diverse cultures, including the tombs and antiquities of to which the family traveled in 1870. [3]

Emily de Forest was among the first rank of collectors of American decorative arts, stimulated by the colonisi revival and the many exhibitions celebrating the nation's centennial. [4] Her initial forays into collecting began as an engaging pastime she took up one summer in the late 1870s. As she described it in a charming memoir she wrote during the 1920s, she was staying with her three young children in a boardinghouse in Connecticut. Having no friends nearby and feeling lonely she was inspired by the desire to own "old things" and began to comb farmhouse attics for "small articles of brass or copper or pewter." [5] By the time the summer was over she had bought andirons, lamps, candlesticks, and painted trays as well as needlework and furniture so that her "hotel bedroom began to look like a miniature museum," as she wrote. [6] This gave her a taste for Americana that remained with her for the rest of her life. For a time she stored the many things she collected in a stable in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Is land, until she and her husband built their country house, Wawapek, on the property in 1898.

The de Forests lived at 7 Washington Square in New York City a Greek revival brick house built for Emily de Forest's grandparents and given to her in 1879. It had been furnished originally by the New York cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe (1768-1854). About 1894 the de Forests added a large library on the garden facade and commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to decorate it and to provide furnishings for some of the other rooms.

The de Forests were distantly related to Tiffany, and Robert's brother, the designer Lockwood de Forest (see P1. VI), had been in partnership with Tiffany during the l880s. Tiffany gave the house an exotic air, incorporating the objects the couple had acquired amid carved teakwood furnishings and paneling ordered from Lockwood de Forest's firm, which maintained a workshop in Ahmadabad, India.

The theme of the library; appropriately, was books and printing. Set in the ceiling were small plaster panels with renditions of bookplates; the walls were stenciled with representations of bookbindings; and quotations about books embellished the broad wooden cornice. The most notable feature of the room was the fireplace wall with a large mosaic surround depicting printers' marks through history (Fig. 2). The mosaic was in shades of gold and richly colored glass, and on the shelf above it was an array of Tiffany's blown-glass vases. The unusual andirons (P1. III) complemented in their glass cabochons the green and white marble fireplace facing and the mosaic surround. It was in this room, in the bay window overlooking the garden, that Emily de Forest displayed her early collection of delicate and willowy flower-form glass vases by Tiffany--her "flower garden," as she described it. [7] These vases may have been among the group of vases the de Forests loaned to the museum in 1923 as part of a larger installa tion mounted by the newly formed department of modern decorative arts. [8] Perhaps because Tiffany loaned the museum a large number of vases from his own collection in 1925, the de Forests' Tiffany glass did not remain at the museum. [9]

When the de Forests built Wawapek they hired the architect Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956), who had previously worked with Tiffany on several projects. [10] Emily de Forest furnished some of the rooms with furniture from her grandparents, and she and her husband invited Tiffany to decorate the parlor. Its distinctive features included a hearth and fireplace with green Tiffany tiles, a Turkish comer, and a leaded-glass window in the Japanesque style. [11] In the same room they installed a stained-glass window that Tiffany had made for them as a present nearly fifteen years earlier. It featured a composition of thick brown seaweed in deep blue water with a border that incorporated actual translucent beach-worn stones. Carved teak furniture, designed by Lockwood de Forest and made in India, furnished the large hail, or living room, which also included a large swing suspended from the ceiling in one corner. One of the most exotic pieces in the house was a folding screen that was recently given to the museum by d e Forest descendants (P1. VI). The carved teak frame is characteristic of Lockwood de Forest's Indian workshop, and the Japanese mixed metal inverted cups used as finials epitomize the American fascination with exotic styles and materials in the 1880s and early 1890s.