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

Frances Gruber Safford

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.

Bolles had chased down this material in eastern Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire, and Connecticut, occasionally buying from individuals, sometimes from other collectors, but most often from dealers and at auction. In 1894 he and his cousin and fellow collector George S. Palmer (1855-1934) acquired the entire furniture collection of Walter Hosmer of Hartford. Palmer, whose taste ran to richly carved mahogany opted for the later pieces, and Bolles kept primarily, but not exclusively the earlier ones. Bolles also made purchases during his travels abroad, and on one trip he sent a friend a postcard of the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey in London, facetiously claiming to have acquired it. [6]

Bolles was born in 1853 on Bolles Hill, north of New London, Connecticut, the fourth child and third son of William Bolles (1800-1883), a publisher and bookseller, and Cornelia Palmer He apparently kept his first name a secret, using only the initial. He was named Hezekiah for his paternal grandfather, although the "H" has incorrectly been said to stand for Horace. [7] In 1882 Bolles was married to Elizabeth Clapp Howe (1853-c. 1920) of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and about four years later they acquired the house at 401 Quincy Street, Dorchester, which they more than filled with their collection and where they entertained many friends. [8] In later years there could not have been much room left for guests. A 1909 inventory shows that the parlor, for example, contained nine case pieces, four tables, ten chairs, nine mirrors, and a plethora of smaller objects. In the attic were more than one hundred pieces of furniture, and in a storeroom at another location there was at least an equal number. [9]

With the sale of his collection Bolles's house must have seemed very empty. On the day the last of the furniture was shipped to the museum Bolles made light of the loss, writing to Kent:

We hope...that before long we shall have the pleasure of another pleasant visit from you. If we have no chairs for you to sit in, you will understand the reason why, and I am sure under the circumstances will not object to sitting on the front stairs. [10]

An incurable collector, Bolles would have had the house fully furnished again in short order had it not been for his untimely death in October 1910.

Kent's plan to display all the Bolles furniture in eight galleries never materialized, but pieces were almost immediately put on view in a new wing for Western decorative arts that opened early in 1910. (It is now the Morgan Wing, currently housing the arms and armor and the musical instruments collections.) There, in three or four rooms on the west side of the upper floor, selections of American furniture and other decorative arts were displayed from 1910 until the early 1920s in various arrangements (see Fig. 6). A larger group of furniture from the Bolles collection was made available in a study room in the basement (see Fig. 5).

The Bolles furniture, augmented by rococo examples purchased from George Palmer in 1918, formed the nucleus of the museums American furniture collection. While not all of the Bolles pieces have withstood the test of time, the collection provided a good core of representative pieces as well as prized objects from every period. Among the choice early colonial furniture are a richly carved chest from Ipswich, Massachusetts (see Pl. III and Fig. 5, center foreground), a small cabinet (Pl. II), and one of several painted chests from the early eighteenth century (Pl. IV). On view in 1913 were fine late colonial objects, such as a walnut high chest with carved and gilded shells and a japanned high chest and matching dressing table, all three from Boston (see Fig. 6), and, nearby a Newport bureau table (Pl. V). In the Federal style Bolles had a predilection for handsome furniture with light-colored veneers set against mahogany, be it case pieces or chairs (see Pl. I).

On the day he sold his collection, Bolles expressed the hope that it would

be the basis of a much larger and complete collection, and inspire a genuine and abiding interest in that range of things from the simple and quaint to the really beautiful, which are commonly called colonial. [11]

How gratified he would have been to witness the opening of the American Wing in 1924, and how amazed he would be at the size and scope of the collection today.

FRANCES GRUBER SAFFORD is an associate curator in the department of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(1.) Hudson-Fulton Celebration commission, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909: The Fourth Annual Report of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission to the Legislature of the State of New York, prepared by Edward Hagaman Hall (State of New York, Albany, New York. 1910), vol. 1, p. 71.

(2.) The 1806 portrait is now in the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York.

(3.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 4 (December 1909), p.218.

(4.) The American decorative arts objects that had then been acquired were primarily examples of late-nineteenth-century design from New York city firms for the purpose of encouraging artistic progress in manufacturing. This was one of the aims of the museum as stated in its charter.

(5.) For more about these collectors see Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1980). Halsey enriched the museum not with his own collection but with his tireless work as a trustee and the chairman of the committee on the American wing. The collection of Judge Clearwater (1848-1933), bequeathed to the museum in 1933, formed the core of the American silver collection.

(6.) The postcard, dated August 23, but with the year illegible, was sent to Mrs. Henrys. King (Bolles correspondence, Metropolitan Museum of Art archives).

(7.) John A. Bolles, Genealogy of the Bolles Family in America (Boston, 1865), p. 43. The erroneous "Horace" first appeared in the Walpole Society Note Book of 1950, p-89.

(8.) Daniel wait Howe, Howe Genealogies, ad. Gilman Bigelow Howe (New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, 1929), vol. 2, pp. 93-94; and undated article (probably 1920) by Mary Fifield King from an unidentified newspaper (Bolles correspondence).

(9.) The inventory is an undated list that was drawn up as part of the negotations for the purchase of the collection, and thus dates to 1909 (Bolles correspondence).

(10.) Letter dated December 17, 1909 (ibid.).

(11.) Latter from Bolles to Kent, October 29, 1909 (ibid.).

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group