Marshall B. Davidson and Elizabeth Stillinger. The American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. — New York, 1985

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOREWORD

John K. Howat 6

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 7

 

INTRODUCTION 9

Charles Engelhard Court 9

 

PERIOD ROOMS 21

The Early Colonial Period, 1630–1730 22

Hart Room 24

Wentworth Room 28

Hewlett Room 34

The Late Colonial Period, 1730–90 40

Almodington Room 42

Powel Room 46

Van Rensselaer Hall 52

Verplanch Room 56

Marmion Room 60

The Federal Period, 1790–1820 62

Haverhill Room 63

Baltimore Room 66

Richmond Room 70

The Shaker Vernacular 34

The Pre–Civil War Period 38

The Greek Revival, 1820–43 38

The Rococo Revival, 1840-60 82

The Gothic Revival, 1830-33 86

The Post-Civil War Period 90

The Renaissance Revival, 1860–80 90

The Twentieth Century 93

 

FURNITURE 99

The Early Colonial Period, 1630–1730 100

The Late Colonial Period, 1730–90 112

The Federal and Early Empire Periods 1790–1820 134

The Shaker Vernacular 132

Windsors 134

Folk Art 133

The Pre–Civil War Period 136

The Greek Revival, 1820–43 136

The Rococo Revival, 1840–60 166

The Gothic Revival, 1830–33 132

The Post–Civil War Period 136

Renaissance, Egyptian, and Related Revivals 1860–80 136

Innovative Furniture 182

Reform Styles, 1833–1913 188

 

SILVER 201

The Colonial Period, 1630–1790 202

The Federal Period, 1790–1830 216

The Pre-Centennial Period, 1830–75 220

The Post-Centennial Period, 1875–1915 223

 

PEWTER 228

 

CERAMICS 235

The Colonial and Federal Periods, 1630–1830 234

The Pre-Centennial Period, 1830–75 239

The Post-Centennial Period, 1875–1915 244

 

GLASS 249

The Colonial and Federal Periods, 1630–1830 230

The Pre-Centennial Period, 1830–75 238

The Post-Centennial Period, 1875–1915 266

 

PAINTINGS, PRINTS, DRAWINGS AND WATERCOLORS 275

The Colonial Period, 1630–1790 236

The Revolutionary Period, 1770–90 282

Miniatures 288

The Early Nineteenth Century, 1790–1840 290

The Mid-Nineteenth Century, 1840–65 300

The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 1865–1915 308

 

SCULPTURE 333

The Colonial and Federal Periods, 1630–1830 334

The Mid-Nineteenth Century, 1840–65 333

The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 1865–1915 341

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 348

 

INDEX 249

 

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When they were opened in October 1924, The American Wing’s sixteen period rooms, three exhibition galleries, and several alcoves caused a sensation. Here, virtually for the first time, American antiques were presented in an orderly, chronological way. In the period rooms, furniture, silver, paintings, glass, and other objects of more or less the same date were arranged together in spaces whose wood- and plasterwork were also of that date. Until this time, American antiques had most often been shown jumbled among curious, exotic, or historically interesting relics at charity fairs and patriotic celebrations. Under the circumstances, it is easy to see why Americans had not until now understood how their heirlooms related to one another or how they might have fit together in colonial and Federal households. Visitors to the new Wing were absolutely astonished to discover, as well, that the rooms were attractive and inviting. “Colonial America had good taste,” exclaimed one headline just after the opening.

 

From its very beginning, The American Wing has had an enormous effect on American taste. Many people were on the verge of turning their attention from European art to the art of their native land, and The American Wing was the spark that set off the great burst of enthusiasm for American antiques and early houses that characterized the 1920s. World War I was over, Americans were feeling the confidence that accompanied their realization that their country was a world power, and many were primed to appreciate their own past and culture. The American Wing’s accomplished and refined picture of home life in colonial and early Federal America showed enthusiasts how to use old houses and antiques together. At the same time, the period rooms greatly influenced the way antiques and department stores and other museums and historic houses across the country arranged their collections. Finally, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the greatest museum in what was by then the greatest American city, endorsed the artistic validity of American arts and crafts by showing them proudly alongside the arts of antiquity, Europe, and the Near and Far East.

 

Even though there are today many more American art enthusiasts than there were in the 1920s, The American Wing still focuses Americans’ interest on their own artistic heritage. In a survey taken at the Museum shortly after the expanded Wing opened in 1980, a number of visitors mentioned their surprise and pleasure at Ending wide-ranging displays of American art: “The American Wing makes an important statement about American art,” said one visitor. “For one thing, it says that our art is as good as European art. More important, however, it says that furniture, sculpture, and stained glass are as valued as paintings.”

 

And indeed, it is the melding of art of a great variety of materials and levels of sophistication that has always distinguished The American Wing. It was a concept for which the period room was a perfect beginning and from which the Museum has branched into collecting in many different categories and periods of American art.

 

The first, and until now the most comprehensive, book about The American Wing was A Handbook of The American Wing, by R. T. H. Halsey, who oversaw the installation of the original Wing, and Charles O. Cornelius, his assistant; it was brought out in the fall of 1924. Henry W. Kent, the Museum’s distinguished secretary and the man who conceived the idea of an American wing for the Metropolitan, had set forth his ideas about a handbook in a 1923 letter to Halsey. “This book should be written in a popular style, and the old-fashioned, dry-as-dust museum catalogue method forgotten,” he advised. Both men must have been pleased by the result, for the Handbook sold nine thousand copies in its first year and eventually went through seven editions.

 

Although the Handbook was organized so that visitors could tour the galleries and rooms in sequence, beginning on the third floor with the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and descending through the mid-eighteenth century on the second to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth on the first, it remained for many years a foremost treatment both of domestic life in the colonies and of American antiques in general, with special emphasis on furniture.

 

Other important publications that deal with nearly all aspects of the collection have been brought out in book, pamphlet, catalogue, and other forms from time to time, and many of them are listed in the Selected Bibliography at the back of this volume. Metropolitan Museum Bulletin articles have announced additions to and presented research on aspects of the collection, beginning in 1910 with an article on the 886 pieces of furniture the Museum had just acquired from H. Eugene Bolles as the foundation of the American Wing collection. Many of these articles are also listed in the bibliography.

 

The present volume is different from the foregoing works, for it treats the whole of the expanded American Wing, rather than one of its parts. It is not a guide to the installation, but to the collection itself, and its illustrations have been selected to represent the remarkable range of that collection—from great paintings and sculptures to period-room appointments. Captions provide up-to-date information on each object illustrated, while the text offers the story of the development of the arts in America—not a “dry-as-dust” book, we hope, but one that will prove a worthy successor, sixty-one years later, to the Handbook.

 

 

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