AFA Winter 2017

Antiques & Fine Art 71 2017 the regional collections of Brandywine illustrators, acquiring a large selection of works by Frank E. Schoonover (1877–1972), and significant examples by notable American impressionist and postimpressionist painters. Biggs pieced together a collection that demonstrated the history of many major movements in American representational painting through the early twentieth century peppered with objects representing the local Delaware flavor of these periods. After 2003, the staff and trustees of the museum initiated several ambitious exhibitions, programs, and capital campaigns to induce greater attention and support from the community. The hiring of my position as museum curator culminated in a three- year expansion and renovation of its galleries (Fig. 3), several ground-breaking publications, educational partnerships, and widening public participation. Perhaps most notably, the museum’s permanent collection has doubled in size. Part of this growth came in the form of an important partial gift of the Colonel Kenneth P. and Regina I. Brown collection of Delaware silver (Fig. 4), As the most important single gift to the museum since the passing of its founder, the Brown Collection is a near encyclopedic collection of work by Delaware silversmiths and retailers until 1900. The museum strives to refine and enlarge the foundational strengths of the original Biggs collection (Fig. 5). In 1992, Biggs left Fig. 1 : The façade of the Biggs Museum of American Art, featuring its first permanent sculptural installation, Aloft (2015), by Erica Loustau, the capstone of the museum’s 2011– 2014 renovation. right Fig. 2 : Peter Egeli (b. 1934), Sewell C. Biggs, 1979. Oil on canvas, 43¼ x 37½ inches. Bequest of Sewell C. Biggs (2004.469). Fig. 3 : The Marcia and Henry DeWitt Gallery, the Biggs Museum of American Art, as it appeared in 2015 after the museum’s three-year renovation. Featured are works by the family of Charles Willson Peale and Federal Delaware furnishings.