AFA 20th Anniversary

20th Anniversary 110 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Richard and his brothers bought environmen- tally and historically significant tracts of land for a dairy business, and for open space. Some fifty years later, in a deal with Natural Lands Trust, the non-profit land conservation orga- niz ation wit h headqua r ters in Media, Pennsylvania, about forty percent of the pur- chased land was designated to become a park and preserve, and sixty percent was sold to conservation-minded owners. Ten miles of public trails now run throughout the sprawling 1,500-acre property. Whether in his business life or during the years of assembling the acreage, Dietrich’s collecting of art and artifacts was an abiding passion. The Foundation continued to grow. At any given time, Dietrich American Foundation items are now on loan to about thirty different institutions, with special consideration given to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Richard also developed close bonds with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms, Winterthur, the Huntington Library, and Mystic Seaport, among other institutions. Foundation objects have been in and out of these collections for decades, the Foundation acting as a kind of lending library of objects that fill gaps in other collections. Fig. 7: The formal living room at Arkadia, showing a Chippendale mahogany bombé desk and John Singleton Copley’s portrait of John Bee Holmes. A framed photograph of Lady Bird Johnson with the John Bee Holmes portrait behind her sits on the desk, along with a silver teapot by Paul Revere. The teapot is very likely the one depicted in Copley’s portrait of Revere, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Fig. 8: Card table, owned by General John Cadwalader (1742–1786) of Philadelphia. Made by Thomas Affleck with carving by James Reynold. Philadelphia, Penn. Mahogany, oak, hard pine, H. 28⅝, W. 39¾, D. 19¾ in.