Americans are voracious collectors. They collect anything and everything. While probably not as popular as stamps, American collections include coins, baseball cards, comic books, and Beanie Babies.
The First American Collectors
Rev. William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, may have become the first documented American collector when he purchased a William and Mary period settee in 1819 for the sole purpose of owning a piece of furniture of an earlier American time. More than a score of years earlier, in 1793, the Massachusetts Historical Society became the first public institution to receive a decorative arts bequest, a chair "of antique fashion" by a resident of Salem. Within a decade several historical and colonial societies had been founded in New England. These were the beginnings of what would become a national interest in squirreling away its past in public and private collections.
Because of the great interest in historical events and individuals, various objects such as furniture, silver, pewter, clothing were preserved and kept in public view as reminders. The librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, Samuel F. Haven, reported in 1842 that "old pictures, old furniture, old plate, and even old books, which have here to fore suffered neglect, and enjoyed but a musty reputation, as uncongenial to the go-ahead habits of our people, are now sought with eagerness as necessary adjuncts of style and the most cherished ornaments of the drawing room." At the time, collecting was an enlightened amateur affair. There were no antique dealers or guidebooks to identifying antiques.
During much the same time, cultured Americans could read freshly written accounts about the newest science and archaeology, learn to discern between Greek and Roman sculpture, develop a profound interest in Gothic architecture and the medieval life it represented, or study the roots of the Renaissance as they were being uncovered in Florence, Rome, and elsewhere. Americans even went to England or Europe to live and to collect. Collections helped determine aesthetic preferences and influenced the direction deemed proper for contemporary art production. In the 1850s, they also influenced preservationists, such as Cummings E. Davis of Concord, Massachusetts, who gathered what he could find of local colonial relics. His accumulation eventually formed key components of the Concord Antiquarian Society collection. By the 1850s, a broad public awareness of national history led to the preservation of such relics as "Old Ironsides," or Mount Vernon.
The Influence of Collectors
As the nation began to anticipate its centennial celebration in 1876, a few furniture dealers began to sell antiques in Boston and New York, and public interest in antiques began to grow with exhibitions focused on American decorative arts. In Boston, The Bunker Hill Centennial Exhibition featured furniture, pewter, and ceramics from the collection of Maj. Ben Perley Poore of Newburyport, Massachusetts, one of the nation's most prominent collectors of colonial objects. Books published in 1877, such as The House Beautiful by Clarence Cook and Pottery and Porcelain by William C. Prime, helped feed public interest in antiques. When Irving Lyon began collecting furniture in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1877, his focus sparked several of his Hartford friends to do the same, and eventually led to his publishing The Colonial Furniture of New England in 1891, the first book devoted to the subject. The expanding number of collectors led to more books and articles on American decorative arts. In 1892, Alice Morse Earle's China Collecting in America became the first scholarly work on ceramics in America. In 1896, Theodore S.
Woolsey, a Yale professor and silver collector, wrote the first article on the collecting of American silver for the popular Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition (1893) devoted much space and ink to collecting. The Fine Arts Building was devoted almost exclusively to paintings and sculpture from American and Europe, while Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York exhibited their colonial furniture tradition.
When William H. Crim auctioned his important decorative arts collection in 1903, he set a new trend in dispersing collections. The following year, Charles L. Pendleton began another tradition when he bequeathed his collection of furniture, silver, ceramics, and paintings to the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1909, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art held an exhibition in conjunction with the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Several collectors participated, and after the show, Eugene Bolles sold his extensive furniture collection to the Museum. The exhibition had also provided an opportunity to establish the Walpole Society, the first American organization devoted to collecting.
Starting just after 1900, Henry Francis Du Pont of Winterthur, Delaware, began to amass an extensive collection of American decorative arts. In 1951, it became the Winterthur Museum. About the same time, Ima Hogg's American collection, second only to Du Pont's, went public in her house museum, Bayou Bend, in Houston.
As if birthing twins, the same cities that saw the genesis of colonial arts collecting also saw the gathering of oriental art objects, as a result of growing trade with the Far East. As early as 1800, the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, had materials brought from India, China, and Japan to the East India Marine Society and the Essex Institute. An early leader of Japanese art collecting in America was Ernest Fenellosa, a great scholar of oriental art at Harvard and the Fine Arts Academy of Tokyo. His collection, dating from the 1880s and 1890s, is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1923, Charles Lang Freer's outstanding oriental collection moved into its own museum, the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. In addition to an astounding array of oriental art, Freer had bought some one hundred paintings and a thousand prints from James Abbot McNeill Whistler. But it was Freer's acquisition of the whole Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room that focused that aspect of his collecting.
In 1804, Thomas Jefferson owned several works of questionable authority; the painter John Trumbull exhibited his small collection at the Park Theater in New York; and the Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts opened. Nevertheless, Americans did not enter the world of seriously collecting paintings until the second half of the nineteenth century. A rarity among collectors, the pioneer collector J. J. Jarves (1818–1888) lived in Florence for about thirty years after 1851. His collection of 119 works was deposited at Yale Art School in New Haven in 1867. Isabella Stewart Gardner commuted between America and Europe, acquiring works on the advice of Charles Eliot Norton, a Harvard professor of fine art. Her collection—arranged the way she had lived with it at Fenway Court in Boston—was opened to the public after she died in 1924. Norton also influenced Bernard Berenson, who, after his graduation from Harvard in 1887, moved to Florence and, from there, asserted an enormous influence as a connoisseur and collector in his villa "I Tatti."
In general, it was only after 1900 that the magnates of American industry and finance—Henry Walter, Andrew Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, J. Pierpont Morgan, Benjamin Altman, Henry Clay Frick, and Joseph E. Widener—began to accumulate extraordinary collections that became available to the public from the 1920s to 1950s. The great dealer, Sir Joseph Duveen, who began his activities in 1886, aided several of these collectors.
Aiming at the serious collector, in 1846, Michael Knoedler set up business in New York as a representative of the French gallery Goupil. Since 1857, the firm has been known as Knoedler's. In 1879, Mary Cassatt and Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer met and their friendship helped influence several collectors. Two Paris dealers, Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard, also helped. In 1886, Durand-Ruel organized an exhibition of over three hundred impressionists in New York, where he opened a branch of his Paris gallery three years later. In Chicago, another friend of Mary Cassatt, Mrs. Potter Palmer, showed impressionist paintings in her home during the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. At about the same time, Martin A. Ryerson, a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibited his taste with sixteen paintings by Monet, five by Renoir, and five by Redon.
In 1898, Miss Etta Cone bought several paintings by Theodore Robinson. This led her and her sister Claribel into the still exotic and generally unaccepted world of contemporary art. In their Baltimore home, they eventually gathered some three thousand objects from around the world. At about the same time Dr. Albert C. Barnes was beginning his pursuit of contemporary works, particularly paintings by Cézanne and Renoir.
Twentieth-Century Collectors
From 1911 to his death in 1924, John Quinn, a New York lawyer, acquired a hoard of some two thousand paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures, representing more than 150 contemporary artists. Duncan Phillips in Washington, D.C., opened his collection to the public in 1921, becoming the first permanent museum of modern art in America.
The early 1950s saw a flowering of art collecting across the United States. In Chicago, Edward and Lindy Bergman, Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Ruth and Leonard Horwich, and Morton and Rose Neumann created complete artistic environments to live in, focusing on Surrealism, outsider art, and Chicago contemporary. They were followed in the 1960s by Dennis Adrian, Lolli Thurm, Roger Brown, and Larry and Evelyn Aronson, who focused almost exclusively on Chicago's own artists, including the Harry Who and the Chicago Imagists.
By the early 1960s, America became the world's center of collecting through the emergence of many American collectors of international significance, such as Dominique de Menil, whose sweeping collection is in Houston, Texas.
Bibliography
Richardson, Brenda. Dr. Claribel & Miss Etta: The Cone Collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Baltimore, Md.: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985.
Taylor, Joshua. The Fine Arts in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Zilczer, Judith. "The Noble Buyer": John Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978.
—Rolf Achilles
