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

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Catherine Hoover Voorsanger

Building on Berry Tracy's legacy, the American Wing has held other groundbreaking exhibitions over the years, and its collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorative arts has been added to judiciously, as the new Deedee Wigmore Gallery attests. Most recently, the occasion of the wing's seventy-fifth anniversary has inspired some extraordinary acquisitions, among them a resplendent rosewood sofa by Belter, a rare aesthetic movement cabinet by Herter Brothers (P1. X), and a repousse iron door by the great Philadelphia metalworker Samuel Yellin (P1. VIII). [13]

CATHERINE HOOVER VOORSANGER is an associate curator in the department of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(1.) These included an Islamic-style enameled, etched, and gilt tea set of 1885-1886; the Magnolia Vase of c. 1893; and the Adams Gold Cup of 1893-1895. The department of American decorative arts files record that fewer than two dozen other gifts were made before 1900, and the William H. Huntington gift of 1883 epitomized the kinds of objects given. It originally comprised approximately five hundred European objects, such as transfer-printed wares, porcelains, bronzes, busts, plaques, medallions, miniatures, and medals, and about three thousand prints collected in Europe, predominantly featuring Washington, Franklin, or Lafayette as subjects.

(2.) See Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, "Louis Comfort Tiffany in the Metropolitan Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 56, no.1 (Summer 1998). The foundation gift in 1951 included Favrile glass, pottery, enamels, and a wooden box.

(3.) The letter is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives. A note inscribed on the hack of it states that the cabinet was valued at fifteen thousand dollars and the pair of chairs at eight hundred dollars.

(4.) Memorandum dated October 26, 1928 (ibid.). The cabinet is now in a private collection.

(5.) The letter is in the Metropolitan Museum archives.

(6.) Memorandum to Edward Robinson, January 17, 1929 (ibid).

(7.) The tale of the Tisch cabinet is based on documents in the Metropolitan Museum archives. In 1957 James Rorimer spared the cabinet from imminent destruction by ordering it returned to the collections. It was reaccessioned by Berry Tracy in 1969 in order to include it in the exhibition 19th-Century America, held the following year.

(8.) Marvin D. Schwartz, Edward J. Stanek, and Douglas K. True, The Furniture of John Henry Belter and the Rococo Revival (EP. Dutton, New York, 1981), p.3.

(9.) Joseph Downs and Ruth Ralston, A Loan Exhibition of New York State Furniture with Contemporary Accessories (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1934). Downs subsequently wrote about Belter in ANTIQUES, September 1948, pp. 166-168. This exhibition was held the same year the American Wing became a separate department within the museum.

(10.) For an annotated bibliography of Kaufmann's writings, see "Edgar J. Kaufmann, jr.; Publications 1938-1989," comp. Alfred Wills, in Edgar J. Kaufmann Jr., Nine Commentaries on Frank Lloyd Wright (Architectural History Foundation, New York, and MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989), pp. 137-156. For insight into Kaufmann's collecting sensibilities, sec Modem Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of the late Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., sale catalogue, Sotheby's (New York), November 15, 1989.