AFA 20th Anniversary

2020 Antiques & Fine Art 111 Richard was most active as a collector in the late 1960s through the late 1980s. During his intense buying years, Richard was acquiring for the foundation, as well as for his personal collection, and in some cases buying to donate items, in particular to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The first decorative-art objects that Richard acquired for the Foundation were two pieces of Chinese export porcelain from the Society of the Cincinnati Service owned by George Washington (Fig. 4). These he purchased from the late ceramics dealer Elinor Gordon, after hearing her give a lecture in 1963. Richard subsequently purchased many George Washington letters, as well as books owned by the first President, and paintings of Washington (Fig. 5), including a James Peale miniature on ivory purchased in 1966. There are close to sixty letters from Washington, as well as correspondence between other important figures from that era: Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, Richard Henry Lee, General Von Steuben, Alexander Hamilton, Lafayette, Charles Thomson, Anthony Wayne, and others. The books and manuscripts collection is housed at Wesleyan University, Richard’s alma mater, and is available for research and to other institutions for loan and scholarship. In 1963 and 1964, purchases of Chinese export porcelain were augmented by maritime objects (Fig. 6) such as ship models and marine watercolors. Richard also purchased documents and rare books through Sessler’s, the leading antiquarian book seller in Philadelphia in those early years. He acquired his first major piece of furniture in 1963, the Massachusetts bomb é desk now attributed to Nathaniel Gould (Fig. 7). Richard came to public notice in 1987 with the purchase of a Philadelphia easy chair, a rare example of eighteenth-century American furniture, once owned by the Revolutionary War hero John Cadwalader. At $2.75 million, the chair set a record for American furniture at the time, and garnered significant press attention for a media-shy collector. Richard donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2002, in honor of the museum’s 125th anniversary. The easy chair joined the gaming table from the Cadwalader family already in the Foundation’s collection and is on long-term loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Fig. 8). Furniture was not among the first objects that the foundation collected, but it quickly became a core strength. Approximately 80 percent of the furniture was made in Pennsylvania, signifying the state’s pride of place and also Richard’s fascination with its history. A particular focus is in furniture made in eastern Pennsylvania from the earliest years of the eighteenth century to about 1785 (Fig. 9). Because the first Dietrichs to the American colonies settled in Berks County, Richard had a strong interest in objects from that area and its Pennsylvania German heritage. The fraktur and Pennsylvania German subject matter of the collection Fig. 9: Tall case clock. Movement, John George Hoff (1733, Westerberg, Germany–1816, Lancaster, Penn); Case, unknown artist. 1768, Lancaster, Penn. Cherry, red mulberry, black walnut, yellow poplar, pewter and mixed wood inlay, H. 105, W. 19¾, D. 11⅜ in.