The Hudson - Fulton exhibition and H. Eugene Bolles - New York Metropolitan Museum, American Wing

For more than two weeks during the fall of 1909 the State of New York commemorated the three hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson's exploration of the river that came to bear his name and the one hundredth anniversary of Robert Fulton's first successful navigation of the Hudson River in a steamboat in 1807.

After four years of planning, the Hudson-Fulton Celebration opened on September 25 with a naval parade in New York harbor that featured replicas of Hudson's Half Moon and Fulton's Clermont accompanied by number of foreign and hundreds of American vessels. In the evening the electrical illumination of the fleet as well as of New York City buildings and bridges was capped by fireworks. Parades and "commemorative exercises" [1] of all sorts took place on the days following, not only in New York City but also along the Hudson River in the towns at which the Half Moon and the Clermont called on their twelve-day progress upriver to Cohoes near Albany, New York. In addition, special exhibitions were mounted in some twenty institutions in New York City.

The Hudson-Fulton exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an ambitious dertaking, in accord with the grand scale of the celebration. The first of two sections comprised 143 seventeenth-century Dutch paintings to commemorate Hudson, all from American collections. The second section contained examples of American art from the seventeenth century to about 1815, the year of Fulton's death. The exhibit was installed in a new wing that extended along Fifth Avenue north of the Great Hall. It was the first of the McKim, Mead and White additions to the museum and had opened in 1909, providing galleries for special exhibitions on the second floor (where Asian art is now housed). The American objects--53 paintings, 176 pieces of furniture, 374 pieces of silver, as well as ceramics, glass, pewter, and textiles -- occupied three of those galleries with, at one end, a portrait of Fulton by Benjamin West (see Figs. 2, 3). [2] The American exhibits were tightly packed along the walls on platforms that in one galler y proved inadequate for the number of objects (Fig. 4). Although the installation now has an archaic look, it incorporated what were then new concepts. Objects were no longer arranged by material, but by period, to create a context. In two instances architectural elements were included to suggest a room setting. The wall paneling shown in Figure 2, for example, was installed in 1924 in the American Wing. Furniture, considered the most important component, was grouped according to the sequence of styles defined in the exhibition's catalogue. Objects in other mediums were not always chronologically in step with the furniture, probably in large part for practical reasons. Pedimented late colonial case furniture, for example, could not support cases of silver of the period, so they were placed instead on earlier oak chests. For lack of seventeenth-century American paintings and because of limited wall space in the eighteenth-century gallery, late colonial paintings were hung over seventeenth-century furniture (se e Fig. 4).

The Hudson-Fulton exhibition, open from September 20 to November 30 and seen by nearly 300,000 visitors, was deemed a "gratifying success." [3] It was the first such comprehensive exhibition of American art to be held in a major art museum, and it proved that American "domestic arts" were worthy of a place in an art museum. It set the Metropolitan Museum on a course of building a collection of colonial and early Federal decorative arts objects.

The force behind the American section of the exhibition was Henry W. Kent (seep. 179, Fig. 3), the assistant to Robert W. de Forest (see pp. 176-181), who was then the secretary of the museum and chairman of the celebration's committee on art exhibits. Kent, who had joined the museum in 1905, had a consuming interest in things American, acquired when he was curator of the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, Connecticut, in the late nineteenth century. It was his friendship with collectors of American deco-rative arts that made the American section possible, for the museum at the time owned almost no colonial American objects. [4] The lenders included the major collectors and scholars of Americana at the time, a number of whom proved critical in the development of the American Wing and its collections. Among them were H. Eugene Bolles (Fig. 1), George S. Palmer, R. T. H. Halsey (see pp. 186-191), and Alphonso T. Clearwater. [5]

The largest lender to the furniture section was Bolles with forty-one objects. While he provided primarily examples from the early colonial period, which was his particular strength, his collection extended to about 1815. Boles was a Boston lawyer who had begun collecting in the 1880s and in twenty-five years had accumulated several hundred pieces of furniture, most of it American complemented by some English examples in corresponding styles. The collection was considered unequaled in size and breadth, and Kent had his eye on it. The Hudson-Fulton exhibition afforded him the occasion to push for the acquisition of Bolles's collection by the museum, and before the close of the show it was bought by the philanthropist Mrs. Russell Sage (1828- 1918) and presented to the museum. In the gift were 434 pieces of furniture plus miscellaneous objects ranging from cooking utensils to fire buckets and helmets, for a total of more than seven hundred objects.