Toasts and Testimonials
On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of our magazine’s founding, curators and scholars, members of the art and antiques trade, collectors, and other readers sent us tributes, memories, comments, and reflections that testify to the immense good will and esteem that ANTIQUES has earned over the course of its history. You will find a selection below, published with our immense gratitude. Exhibitions in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently covered in ANTIQUES include the bequest of Tiffany silverware designer Edward C. Moore (May/June 2020); the aesthetic movement furniture collection of Barrie and Deedee Wigmore (January/ February 2020); and the Diker Collection of Native American art (January/February 2019). Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a longtime reader of The Magazine ANTIQUES, I’m pleased to join in celebrating its centennial. That it anticipates by two years a similar anniversary in the American Wing, founded in 1924, makes it that much more resonant for me. From the first, the two organizations shared a symbiotic relationship in their emphasis on early Euro-American material culture, grounded in a popular colonial revival zeitgeist then sweeping the country that privileged ideas of Americanness and cultural nationalism. A 1949 editorial in the magazine marking the wing’s twenty-fifth anniversary described the Met’s physically freestanding department as a “pioneering effort . . . that led the way in furthering knowledge and appreciation of our American heritage. It is no exaggeration to say that its influence has been felt, directly or indirectly, by all the museums and historical societies working in the American field, all the restorations public and private, all the publications on antiques, and all the collectors of American things.” The editorial went on to call for an expanded educational mission—and a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—as the wing looked