Originally published in Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1907-2013, edited by Danielle O. Kisluk-Grosheide, Deborah L. Krohn, and Ulrich Leben. New Haven and London: Published for Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York by Yale University Press, 2013. 1-17.

From the exhibition: Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art was still a relatively small institution when J. Pierpont Morgan assumed the position of president in 1904.1 A powerful financier, collector, and larger-than-life figure, he had been involved with the Museum on and off since its founding. That same year, the trustees appointed Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, formerly the head of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as director following the death of his predecessor Luigi Palma di Cesnola. During his tenure as president until his death in 1913, Morgan played a dominant role in the refinement and expansion of the collections. His efforts resulted in the creation of new curatorial departments, a growing professional staff, and the construction of a new wing. In 1902, for instance, he purchased the important collection of Chinese porcelain that had been lent to the Museum by James A. Garland and kept it on loan there.2 Four years later he acquired an extensive collection of medieval art and French eighteenth-century decorative arts from the Parisian decorator Georges Hoentschel, which significantly enriched the holdings of the institution.

In pursuing both fine arts as well as decorative or “useful” arts, the Metropolitan’s collecting policy was similar to that of other American institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (founded 1870), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1876), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1879). None of these sister institutions, however, could boast at this early date of outstanding holdings of French medieval art comparable to those of the Hoentschel collection. Only Isabella Stewart Gardner’s eclectic museum in Boston, and that of William T. Walters and his son Henry in Baltimore, which opened to the public as densely displayed private collections in 1903 and 1909, respectively, included important examples of medieval art. Moreover, neither had a concentration of French art. The medieval and Renaissance treasures from Émile Gavet’s collection, acquired by Alva Vanderbilt in 1889 and installed in the so-called Gothic Room at Marble House, Newport, were not accessible to the public. The eighteenth-century part of the Hoentschel collection, consisting of French paneling, furniture, decorative paintings and gilt-bronze mounts, made the Metropolitan’s holdings unique in the United States at the time.3

The arrival of the Hoentschel artworks in New York did not take place without some fanfare and drama. “A Famous Collection Lost to Our Museum; M. Hoentschel, Grieving for His Dead Wife, Will Not Sell Now,” proclaimed a New York Times headline on December 1, 1906.4 The French decorator’s art treasures were said to be his chief consolation after the loss of his wife, despite the New York financier’s alleged offer of $600,000. The writer expressed hope that Hoentschel might be willing to accept Morgan’s offer in the future. Just before Christmas, the newspaper again discussed the collection that Hoentschel had used “in the course of his business, as models from which to copy, when his clients asked for interiors after bygone fashions in decorative art …” and noted “that the Hoentschel collection coming here would be doubly welcome just now, when so many artists are turning their energies from painting and sculpture to the industrial arts.”5

Evidently, the writer did not know that Hoentschel had already sold the collection to Morgan. A purchase agreement for four million French francs had been drawn up on April 27, 1906, and the sale arranged through the London dealer George Durlacher.6

Durlacher, who played an instrumental role in the formation of Morgan’s collection of Renaissance bronzes, also introduced the banker to Hoentschel.7 Apparently without consulting the director, Morgan bought the collection with the Metropolitan Museum in mind. Purdon Clarke traveled to Paris almost immediately after the purchase was completed and in an ensuing report described the collection in glowing terms.8 Morgan proposed on the spot to present the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century objects to the Museum and initially offered to lend the medieval works, suggesting that he would probably donate them in due course.9

Given the fact that the institution did not yet have holdings in medieval art, one wonders why Morgan decided to lend the older artworks rather than giving them outright. The distinction between acquisitions Morgan made for his private collection and those intended for the Museum was not always clear, neither could his various homes accommodate all that he bought. His decisions may have had as much to do with his personal preferences as with his view that this part of the collection was the more valuable and superior one, while the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century model collection, although useful for teaching purposes, was considered more of a curiosity.10 The day before he acquired Hoentschel’s collection Morgan also bought from him the bronze angel known as the Ange du Lude, a silver-gilt high relief of a king, the so-called Roi de Bourges, and several other early pieces.11

Photographs of the interiors at 58, boulevard Flandrin, Paris—where Hoentschel installed his collection in 1903—show the medieval works in the basement, and the later pieces, consisting largely of seat furniture, console tables, and elaborately carved woodwork, on the main floor. The Museum asked Charles F. McKim of the prestigious New York architecture firm McKim, Mead, & White, who had designed the Morgan Library and already had an affiliation with the Museum, to examine the Hoentschel collection in Paris.12 His visit would establish whether the entire collection could be adequately exhibited, albeit temporarily, in the north extension on Fifth Avenue known as Wing E, then underway. A temporary display was necessary since Morgan did not want the artworks stored in the basement. Further, McKim would help determine what the most effective arrangement of the collection should be “in a part of the Museum yet to be designed.”13 Morgan apparently considered the interior of the recently opened Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris an ideal example, while Purdon Clarke thought the top-lit arrangement at the boulevard Flandrin to be very successful.14

McKim returned with several sketches of the Hoentschel gallery with a future extension of the Museum for the collection in mind. Two colossal columns with Ionic capitals, flanked by pilasters, served as a focal point at the far end of the main gallery at boulevard Flandrin and clearly inspired his design for the Museum’s new wing.

The architect was familiar with the interiors of the Musée des Arts décoratifs, located since 190515 in the Louvre’s Pavillon de Marsan and home to the large bequest of the dealer, decorator, and collector Émile Peyre.16 Although stronger in medieval and Renaissance objects than in eighteenth-century art, the Peyre collection, also consisting mostly of fragments, is in many ways comparable to Hoentschel’s.17 We do not know if Peyre, more than thirty years older than Hoentschel, influenced him as a collector. The two men were acquainted, had purchased artworks from each other, and had even worked together on decorating projects.18

In New York, no time was wasted—by early December 1906 Purdon Clarke and Edward Robinson, the Museum’s assistant director, had already examined McKim’s plans for the new North Central Gallery, as it was initially called (later Wing F).19 The design of the central hall with clerestory windows, flanked on either side by lower galleries divided over two floors, adapted from the layout of the Musée des Arts décoratifs, found favor with Museum officials. Morgan approved the detailed plans for the building in March of 1907, and this interior wing, built in record time, opened three years later.20 In the meantime the Paris emballeur-expéditeur, Maurice Pottier, packed and shipped Hoentschel’s collection.21 The eighteenth-century section was first disassembled and then the medieval artworks. On January 12, 1907 the first shipment left France from Le Havre aboard the steamer Bordeaux. Not everything went well; when the initial consignment of thirty crates arrived in New York, “in several instances the objects were damp and wet, although the packing and cases didn’t show that any water had entered from the outside.”22 No further accidents appear to have occurred and the entire collection, in 364 packing cases, shipped in twelve consignments, was stored in the basement of the Museum by the middle of May.

In France, on the front page of Le Figaro, the critic Léon Roger-Milès lauded the departure of the Hoentschel artworks for the United States. With patriotic fervor he expressed the hope that the objects would educate the American eye and refine the sense of aesthetics in America.23 The art historian Gaston Brière echoed this sentiment when he wrote: “Any qualms we may feel at the departure of these magnificent relics of our artistic heritage are alleviated by the thought that they will give Americans an accurate and exalted understanding of French taste.”24

When the American press finally learned about Morgan’s acquisition in May 1907, an article in the New York Herald explained that the negotiations and sale had been kept secret out of fear that the French authorities would make an effort to prevent the artworks from leaving France if it became known that they had been sold to an American.25 Later that same day Robert W. De Forest, then secretary to the Museum’s board of trustees, officially confirmed Morgan’s purchase. He denied, however, that there “has been any reason to fear any interference by the French authorities with the transfer of this collection to an American museum. Neither Mr. Morgan nor the Metropolitan Museum of Art would knowingly purchase any objects in Europe which had been declared to be national property and the export of which was forbidden by European governments.”26 A further flurry of articles appeared, including one by the Museum’s assistant director Robinson, which explained that news of the Hoentschel collection’s acquisition had been withheld until a descriptive catalogue could be prepared.27

The Hoentschel collection’s arrival had a great impact on the Metropolitan Museum. Morgan’s combined gift and loan made it obvious that the already overcrowded building had to be enlarged, and led to the construction of a new wing, the first addition planned “with a definite knowledge of, and with direct reference to, the collections it was to contain.”28 Not only did the institution derive its initial strength in French art from the Hoentschel collection but the Morgan gift also resulted in the creation of a decorative arts department, the first of its kind in an American museum. Another important consequence was the introduction of a systematic and integrated museum display; the Hoentschel objects were not to be segregated in their own galleries as other private collections in the Museum had been, but were to be shown with other comparable pieces.29 Morgan himself expressed the wish that the Hoentschel artworks should be the nucleus of a great collection of decorative arts. He placed no restrictions on his gift and loan, but asked that “the objects shall be placed upon the walls with such freedom of spacing that other things of a similar character may be hung among them as they accumulate.”30

The execution of this new display was to rest largely on the shoulders of William (Wilhelm) R. Valentiner, appointed as the first curator of the new decorative arts department. A Rembrandt scholar, he had served as the personal assistant to Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Morgan felt it was desirable to have a clear understanding of the curator’s responsibilities and duties before he was to arrive in America.31 On December 18, 1907 Robinson wrote to Valentiner, “The Department of Decorative Arts is a new one in the museum, not yet organized. Just what its limits shall be, and the nature of your own work in it, can be determined only after your arrival, by arrangement between the director and yourself, but I think I can promise you that, like all other work in the museum with its rapid growth, it will be full of interest and opportunities.”32

After a rough ocean crossing Valentiner arrived in New York in February 1908. The Museum struck him as disorganized compared to European institutions.33 He described the guards as poorly disciplined, whistling, spitting, and lounging on benches instead of watching the visitors and preventing children from misbehaving. With the exception of “some fake Renaissance furniture” and an ornate Louis XV style room with the Bishop collection of Far Eastern jade, no “arts and crafts,” as he called them, were shown. Since the new wing had not yet been completed in 1908, Valentiner organized a temporary display of medieval art in the Museum’s main hall, and quickly realized that its classical style formed an unsuitable background for the Gothic sculptures.34 For that reason, Valentiner installed only a selection of sculpture, furnishings, and tapestries on the north side of the hall, arranged chronologically.35 No photographs of this exhibition seem to exist, but according to written descriptions a row of early Gothic double columns, which had also been prominently displayed in Hoentschel’s basement at boulevard Flandrin, formed the entrance.36 An opening in the center led directly to the principal piece of sculpture on loan from Morgan’s own collection, the early fifteenth-century limestone Entombment from the Château de Biron, which the financier acquired in May 1907 through the intermediation of the dealer Jacques Seligmann.37 Valentiner placed several of Hoentschel’s stone groups in front of early French tapestries and, pleased with the result, noted, “I was thrilled as I saw the strange effects which resulted when the large sculptured figures were placed directly in front of the giant shadowy figures of the Gothic tapestries.”38 The Burlington Magazine praised the exhibition as “a model of [a] well-ordered and effective installation.”39

Although Morgan’s purchase did cause some regret in France that these treasures were lost to the nation, gratitude was felt that the Hoentschel collection lived on in the form of a sumptuous four-volume catalogue which was published in 1908 (see Chapter 4).40 André Pératé, curator at the Château de Versailles, co-authored the books with Brière, who would succeed him at the palace.41 Henry W. Kent, assistant secretary to the Museum’s board of trustees, proposed to publish an English translation, which would serve as a Metropolitan Museum catalogue. A translator was hired and the work was well on its way until Valentiner’s arrival at the Museum put a stop to this project. Valentiner disagreed with many of the dates and attributions in the first volume of the French-language edition, devoted to medieval and Renaissance art, and felt that the English version could not be published without making many changes and as a result the project did not come to fruition.42

In anticipation of the March 15, 1910 opening of the new wing with the Hoentschel collection as its core, an article in the New York Times stated that the addition “owes its particular importance less, perhaps, to the objects assembled, remarkable as many of these are, than to the method of their arrangement.”43 Museums of industrial or applied arts, most notably London’s South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), tended to present their objects by medium and technique, making the collections particularly useful as models for designers and craftsmen.44 The founders of the Metropolitan Museum expressed a similar didactic purpose when they wrote in 1871 that the institution should form a collection of “industrial art, of objects of utility to which decorative art has been applied …” for the use of mechanics and students.45 Purdon Clarke, who had been in charge of the Victoria and Albert Museum before becoming director of the Metropolitan Museum in 1905, preferred a display by medium.

The Museum chose a different solution for the new wing, however, exhibiting European and American artworks chronologically by period and country.46 Valentiner’s idea to exhibit decorative arts together with paintings and sculpture was inspired by Bode’s integrated displays in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Opened in 1904, this institution and its installations were naturally familiar to Valentiner.47 Describing the New York arrangements as “period rooms,” Valentiner wished to offer the visitor “a perception of the principal art epochs thru well-spaced masterpieces. …”48 He accomplished this by evoking rooms and spaces for which the artworks had been conceived, something he had learned from Bode as well. Valentiner was not particularly focused on the interest of design students and artisans since they constituted only a few of the Museum’s visitors.49 He felt that the general American public, not immersed in its daily life “in the art and culture of an extraordinarily rich past” should “be educated to the genuine enjoyment of art and given an acquaintance with the outstanding examples of artistic achievement.” In his opinion this was only possible when the collections were arranged in a stimulating manner and when individual objects could be seen in relative isolation, “for a plethora of art objects spoils the pleasure.”50

European sculpture and tapestries dominated the main hall of the new wing. With the exception of three rooms on the second floor devoted to American art, the side galleries exhibited various European decorative arts. Compared to the installation of the Bishop jade room or the gallery with the Edward C. Moore collection, the arrangement looked refreshingly modern and spacious. French art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries filled seven rooms on the second floor—with carved woodwork, paneling, mantelpieces, and decorative paintings on the walls, and furniture on platforms below. The incomplete boiserie of an early eighteenth-century room, assembled as an alcove, echoed the presentation at boulevard Flandrin.51 The Museum’s first installation of what became known as the Morgan alcove was the subject of a painting by the American artist Walter Gay.

In celebration of the opening, the Museum published a supplement to its Bulletin dedicated to this extension where the visitor, by walking through the different spaces, could study the development of the decorative arts from the twelfth to the nineteenth century.52 An article in The Nation called the installation “so eminently successful that the precedent will not remain a solitary one,” and even mentioned the special ventilation in the building to keep the valuable woodwork from the Hoentschel collection in stable condition.53 The favorable reception made the decorative arts wing a model for other American museums. Even Bode requested a complete set of views of the interiors for ideas in connection with the new museum he was preparing in Berlin.54 Hoentschel saw the installation during a visit to New York in February 1911, but his impressions are not recorded.55

Throughout its initial decade in New York, the Hoentschel collection at the Metropolitan Museum was well known.56 It exerted distinct influence on American taste, stimulating an interest in and appreciation of French decorative arts. Inside the House that Jack Built, a 1914 home decorating manual written in conversational style by George Leland Hunter, for instance, refers to it as “a marvelous collection of old French furniture, tapestries, and woodwork. … There you can see for yourself the difference between Louis XIV and XV and XVI, and know that you are not being led astray by some remote American imitation.”57 Also in 1914 Alvan Crocker Nye, an instructor at the Pratt Institute, illustrated six pieces of Hoentschel’s French furniture in a new edition of his handbook Furniture Designing and Draughting.58

Students and copyists were allowed to work in the decorative arts wing or in a special classroom where objects removed from the galleries were available. The institution had clearly realized the goal, expressed in the Museum’s 1870 charter, “of encouraging and developing the study of the fine arts, and the application of arts to manufacture and practical life. …”59 A modest exhibition in 1917, The Designer and the Museum, showed how designers had utilized the Museum holdings during the previous year. It included several pieces of furniture derived from objects in the Hoentschel collection as well as several decorative panels that are easily recognized in photographs of the show as copies of Hoentschel paintings.60 The collection exerted influence beyond New York as well: the wood-paneled library in the Washington residence of the successful businessman Raymond T. Baker was based on one of Hoentschel’s incomplete boiseries that was on display at the Museum for many years.61

New acquisitions which included the installation of several period rooms, the lack of which had been keenly felt, brought changes to the decorative arts wing.62 More objects came from Morgan; he bought two other collections from Hoentschel, one in 1907 consisting of stained glass and Limoges enamels,63 and another in 1911 which included more enameled artworks and important ivories, also referred to as the second Hoentschel collection.64 Following Morgan’s purchases, two additional volumes, both published in 1911, were devoted to these Hoentschel objects.65

The 1909 change in the American tariff law allowing the duty-free import of works of art more than twenty years old, and the imposition of new death duties in England in 1910, led to Morgan’s decision later that year to transfer his collections from Europe to New York.66 Shipped to America in 1912, the artworks, including the so-called second Hoentschel collection, were part of the large Morgan Loan Exhibition at the Museum. Although planned during Morgan’s life, the exhibition did not open until 1914, nearly a year after the financier’s sudden death on March 31, 1913.67 Following the exhibition, his son and heir Jack Morgan made two gifts to the Museum. In 1916 he donated the medieval and Renaissance works from Hoentschel’s collection that had been on loan to the institution since 1907.68 The gift included such masterpieces as the Enthroned Virgin and Child, a twelfth-century walnut reliquary sculpture from Auvergne. The following year he gave three thousand objects from his father’s private collection that had been shown in the Loan Exhibition.69 The building, where the Hoentschel collection had been since 1910, would, thereafter, be devoted to the permanent display of artworks “gathered by John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) and given by him and his son to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the instruction and pleasure of the American People.”70 Officially designated the Pierpont Morgan Wing, the decorative arts galleries reopened on June 11, 1918.71 After the reinstallation, the once well-known Hoentschel collection slowly lost its identity, overshadowed by Morgan. It is, after all, the name of the donor rather than of the collector that appears in the credit line. After creating a separate division for medieval art in 1934, the Museum divided the Hoentschel collection between its Department of Medieval Art and the Department of Renaissance and Modern Art, and later transferred some of the paintings to the Department of European Paintings.

Following an extensive reconstruction program during the early 1950s, the Museum moved its decorative arts collections out of the Morgan Wing and relocated them to another part of the building. In February 1953, five galleries devoted to the finest objects from the Middle Ages, including the Medieval Sculpture Hall, opened on the first floor. Twelve adjoining galleries displayed sculpture and decorative arts from the Renaissance.72 Several months later the collections of post-Renaissance decorative arts were available to the public again. Divided over thirty-four galleries, they included the paneling of the so-called Morgan alcove, which had been dismantled and reinstalled in a different location, as well as a series of recently acquired French eighteenth-century period rooms.73 Many of the individual panels formerly shown in the Morgan Wing were sent to storage. With the generous support of Mr. and Mrs. Charles B. Wrightsman, who first became involved with the Museum during the 1960s, the Museum gradually improved and expanded its French period rooms.74 The couple’s many gifts and purchases considerably enriched the Museum’s holdings of decorative arts from the ancien régime, and for that reason only the highlights from the Hoentschel collection—the Morgan alcove (reinstalled for the third time), the most important pieces of furniture, and some examples of woodwork—remained on view in the galleries of French decorative arts that bear the Wrightsman name.

When the crates containing the Hoentschel collection arrived at the Museum, their contents were documented only by brief descriptions in the shipping lists. Although the 1908 catalogue by Pératé and Brière offered beautiful photographs and detailed descriptions, it included only about one-third of the collection. It is unclear who decided what should be published. In one case, however, Hoentschel apparently did not allow a series of eight panels to be published because he had learned around the time of the sale that they were most likely stolen property.75 Originally, this carved woodwork was part of the interior decoration of the Château de Gaillon, in the Haute Normandie region. Executed for cardinal Georges d’Amboise early in the sixteenth century, the panels had belonged since 1801 to the French state. Sold with the rest of Hoentschel’s collection, they came to the Museum without any indication of their provenance, which Stella Rubinstein rediscovered in 1917.76

Pératé and Brière knew (or believed they knew) the provenance of certain pieces. For instance, they noted that Hoentschel had purchased some medieval objects, including the Enthroned Virgin and Child and a Nativity relief, from Émile Molinier, a curator at the Louvre.77 In the introduction to the second volume, devoted to eighteenth-century furniture and paneling, Brière wrote that it was nearly always impossible to know the provenance of fragments of woodwork from demolished buildings.78 Further, a part of the eighteenth-century model collection already belonged to the inventory of Maison Leys when Hoentschel took over the business from his cousin Ernest Leys in 1892.

Scholars such as Pierre Verlet, Bruno Pons, and Christian Baulez have identified the origins and artists of a number of pieces since the collection entered the Museum. They proved wrong Raymond Koechlin’s assertion in 1908 that Hoentschel had no royal furnishings in his collection.79 We know now that a wonderful sculptural fragment consisting of four putti and a pair of dolphins perched on a plinth, for instance, was part of the console table made for the state bedchamber of Queen Marie Leszczyńska at Versailles in 1730.80 Jules Degoullons, Mathieu Legoupil, and Jacques Verberckt created the table and its matching pier glass, still in the room at the palace today, after designs by Robert de Cotte.

An anonymous pair of overmirrors in the collection has been recognized as the work of the sculptor Philippe-Laurent Roland for the billiards room at the château de Bagatelle.81 Research undertaken for an exhibition in 2007, exactly a century after the Hoentschel artworks arrived at the Museum, has proven that a set of overdoors was part of Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul’s cabinet intérieur at Chanteloup.82

Not all the discoveries, however, are as positive, and the age or quality of certain objects have been questioned. This was especially true for an elaborate walnut cabinet that held a prominent place in Hoentschel’s medieval display at boulevard Flandrin. It is, in fact, a mid-nineteenth-century revival piece incorporating earlier elements. While the majority of Hoentschel’s medieval objects are considered to be among the finest of their kind in American collections, a few are no longer thought to be genuine. A portable reliquary that once belonged to the renowned Russian collector prince Pierre Soltykoff and later in the possession of the collector-dealer Frédéric Spitzer is one such example of an object that may have been created to deceive an unsuspecting buyer.

Generally, Georges Hoentschel had a discerning eye for quality resulting in outstanding collections of medieval ivories, enamels, goldsmiths’ work, and sculpture as well as eighteenth-century chairs, paneling, carved decoration, and gilt bronze, many still on permanent display at the Museum. The scientific examination of woodwork and furniture undertaken for the present exhibition has revealed extensive restorations and stripping. The craftsmen of Maison Leys may have removed paint layers because they were considered to obscure the quality of the carving. Exposed oak was more in accordance with late nineteenth-century taste, which favored stripped and dark woods.83 The examinations also shed light on other workshop practices, such as the careful incorporation of eighteenth-century carved fragments into new paneling.84 This fact eloquently illustrates Elisabeth Luther Cary’s description of Hoentschel: “Like Cuvier he could reconstruct a whole skeleton from a bone.”85

Morgan’s decision to acquire the Hoentschel collection for The Metropolitan Museum of Art had a tremendous effect on the institution. The arrival of this large and important group of objects in 1907 made it clear that the building needed to be expanded and its collections reorganized. It resulted in the creation of a new curatorial department for decorative arts, the first in the country, and the appointment of Valentiner as its curator. On Morgan’s directive, the Hoentschel collection was not secluded in its own galleries but presented in a systematic and chronological manner and integrated with related objects. Other American institutions embraced and copied this interpretation. Ranging from the Middle Ages up to the French Revolution, Hoentschel’s treasures served as an inspiration to students, designers, and manufacturers alike, and advanced an appreciation of the arts of France. The collection constitutes the core of the Metropolitan’s holdings in medieval and later French decorative arts, which have maintained their preeminence in the United States. Their popularity with the Metropolitan Museum’s visitors indicates the hope expressed in 1907 by Paris art critics for the Hoentschel collection—that it might develop the American public’s appreciation for the arts of France—has been fulfilled.

© Bard Graduate Center, Daniël Kisluk-Grosheide.