Americana

"In contradiction of a belief, still fairly current, that any creditable assemblage of early American art is impossible, this exhibition is presented. . . ." Thus, at the opening of the new American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan, spoke Robert W. De Forest, President of the Museum, donor of the addition. A notable gathering listened, among them Lawyer Elihu Root, who also spoke. Said he: "We have here a chronicle of American history, more profound and more legible than any that the pen has ever created, for here is the concrete record that our forbears have left, not merely of their deeds, but of their way of thought, in the walls that housed them, the atmospheres that colored their lives . . . from the low-ceilinged room of the 17th Century ... to the ballroom where Washington danced and the fine rooms of the early 19th Century." Wandering through the passages of that new wing, members of the notable gathering saw what Lawyer Root meant. There were many rooms, built in older decades for homes, set up again for History.

P:A room from the house of one John Hewlett, gentleman, who lived on Long Island in the early 17th Century. This Hewlett, since he had a word to say from time to time to a secret friend or a smuggler maybe, furnished his library with a little stairway to the cellar behind a sliding panel, by which means he managed his affairs quite neatly and kept mud from the hall carpet.

P:A room from the house of a Newport merchant of the mid-18th Century. There stands the desk at which, glowering and growling, he read the Stamp Act; and having read, called for his boots, drank a stirrup-cup, rode off to New York to protest against it.

P:A room from a tavern in Alexandria, Va., in which Washington attended his last birthday ball, in which Lafayette, that gallant soldier, was dined by old comrades at arms with great ceremony in 1824.

P: Two rooms from Haverhill, Mass., furnished in that suave and hardy decorum that obtained when shipowners sat smoking in them, seeing in smoke their clippers beat round the Horn, their East Indiamen, under a cloudy tower of sail, treading the huddle of the seas.

P: Other rooms there are, innumerable; also many rare and valuable pieces of Colonial art. First among these was a painting, said to be the oldest existing U. S. portrait. It shows the countenance of Jacobus Gerritsen Striker, chief burgomaster of New Amsterdam during the governorship of Peter Stuyvesant, painted by himself. In velvet jacket, linen collar, with a three-bottle flush that time cannot temper nor death dismay, he stares out, that burgomaster, at the intrusion of the centuries.