Antiques

Magazine Antiques, March, 2003 by Wendell Garrett

I do not believe in the end of man.... I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit, capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

William Faulkner, "Speech on Acceptance of the Nobel Prize," 1950

In Faulkner's fictional world it is memory that pulls pieces of the past into the present and resurrects the dead. A museum is in its own way a model of memory, for by preserving the past it ensures the future. Like any work of art within it, the museum is an act of faith in the power of the human imagination. Hillwood Museum and Gardens in northwest Washington, D.C., the subject of this issue, provides tangible evidence of the range of mankind's creativity in the fine and decorative arts.

In antiquity a museum was an academy or a library and even in the eighteenth century a museum could be a temple for the veneration of the muses. Most properly it was a building in which scholars lived, dined, and studied together. Museums dedicated to the arts and open to the public are relatively recent.

When the Ashmolean Museum was opened to Oxford students in 1683 the diarist John Evelyn called it the "first public institution for the reception of rarities in art or nature established in England." This movement to form cabinets of rarities culminated in the creation of the British Museum in London for "the learned and curious" by an act of Parliament in 1753. Although technically open to the public, entry was limited to holders of scarce tickets of admission.

The evolution of the cabinet of curiosities into the museum we know today took place in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. The setting and construction of monumental museum buildings revealed the emerging view that art was sacred and that the museum was not only a temple of art but a work of art itself. In Europe the proximity of the museum to the cathedral and palace reminded visitors that here was a national institution equal in standing to church and state.

Across the Atlantic the democratic views of Thomas Jefferson and the enlightened cynicism of Benjamin Franklin created the pattern of the American museum, filled with objects donated by private individuals and supported by taxation and popular subscription.

Works of art are the timeless currency in the exchange of human aspirations and values. It remains for our generation to decide whether we shall guarantee the ebb and flow of this currency or whether we, the temporary custodians, will debase one of the remaining measures of our immortality.