Collecting the nineteenth century for the American Wing - New York Metropolitan Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger

The Metropolitan Museum of Art began to acquire American decorative arts of the post-Federal period, or later nineteenth century, shortly after it was founded in 1870. The 1870s and 1880s were a heady time for the decorative arts in general, for it witnessed the advent of the aesthetic movement in America- the manifestation of a British design movement that advocated the beautification of useful objects and celebrated the collecting and study of decorative arts. This burgeoning interest in the decorative arts was further encouraged by the 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia, where American decorative arts were displayed in an international context.

Decorative arts were part of the Metropolitan Museum's collecting agenda from its inception, although its focus was on antique and European rather than American material. For most of the museum's first century American examples from the later nineteenth century were acquired more by chance than by calculation, mostly as sporadic gifts of objects deemed noteworthy by their owners or makers. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the poet and newspaper editor, who was a founding trustee of the museum, gave it its first contemporary American object, the eponymous silver vase commissioned from Tiffany and Company in 1875 to commemorate Bryant's eightieth birthday in 1874 (Pl.I). At the time it was the most famous piece of presentation silver made in the United States, and for nearly twenty years it was the only piece of American silver in the collection. Several other masterpieces by Tiffany and Company were donated around 1900. [1]

The first American glass to enter the collection was a magnanimous gift of fifty-six Favrile vases and roundels by Louis Comfort Tiffany, presented by Henry Osborne Have-meyer (1847-1907) in 1896. Among subsequent acquisitions of Tiffany glass were the monumental Autumn Landscape window (see p. 194, P1.IV), purchased in 1925 by Robert W. de Forest (see pp. 176-181) for the new American Wing, and the gift in 1951 from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation of forty-four pieces that had been on loan for a quarter century. [2]

The museum's representation of Tiffany glass and Tiffany and Company silver did not extend to the wider arena of later nineteenth-century decorative arts, however. The American furniture presented to the museum in its early decades was neither well understood nor appreciated. In the furniture story is a historiographic tale about interest--or lack thereof--in nineteenth-century American decorative arts during the twentieth century.

On May 22, 1888, Auguste Pottier (1823--1896), a principal of Pottier, Stymus and Company, one of America's great cabinetmaking and decorating firms of the post-Civil War period, wrote to the Metropolitan Museum's director, General Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832--1904), to offer three pieces of furniture to the fledgling collections:

I take pleasure in offering to your institution a magnificent specimen of American cabinet work and rich carving, in the shape of a large bahut with 2 chairs to match, in the style of Henry II,--made by our firm for the Centennial Exposition....

...as they are artistic in every sense and considered of unusual merit, I would be pleased to present them to the Museum. They are at the disposition of your Committee at any time, should they see fit to accept and expose them to the view of the art-loving public. [3]

The museum accepted Pottier's gift, and the chairs, more aesthetic movement than historical in style, reside today in the American Wing (see P1. III). The cabinet was deaccessioned in 1929, a victim of twentieth-century distain for the later nineteenth century. Although meritorious for its carving and historical importance and despite its valuation at the lordly sum of fifteen thousand dollars when it was donated, the cabinet was a large-scale exhibition piece that must have seemed cumbersome and, perhaps, the very embodiment of late nineteenth-century excess. Certainly, it did not fit within the rubric of the colonial or Federal periods, which dominated the collecting of American decorative arts after the turn of the century. Nor did the establishment of the American Wing in 1924 (then part of the department of decorative arts) ensure that later nineteenth-century American decorative arts would be part of the collections. Subject to comparison with the venerated products of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries on one hand, and viewed in the raking light of early modernism on the other, by the 1920s, post-Federal American furniture and other decorative arts had fallen far from grace. In a memo to the director Edward Robinson (1858-1931), in October 1928, Joseph Breck (1885-1933), then the curator of the department of decorative arts, addressed the subject of more than three hundred objects in his charge that he wished to dispose of, among the furniture, "many 19th century atrocities." [4]

The tale of a well-known cabinet by Charles Tisch is equally harrowing. A paragon of the 1 880s Queen Anne style with an important history, Tisch's cabinet (Fig. 1) is well documented by correspondence in the museum's archives, making it key to the attribution of related pieces with similar marquetry. Tisch wrote to the museum on April 22, 1889, that he had.