AFA Summer 2021

Summer 68 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com also shipped inventory to regional and university museums across the country in the hopes it would be either added to their respective collections or secure sales from private collectors. The list of venues is quite staggering, from Wellesley College in Massachusetts to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, to name just a few. Writing, lecturing, and preparing exhibitions, all of which Cahill and Halpert did, helped drive the market for folk art. In 1947, Buffalo Hunter (fig. 2a) was included in a traveling exhibit showcasing American paintings at the Tate Gallery in London, where it was praised for having no contemporary counterpart in England. The gallery’s policy of limiting their patronage to museums and private permanent collections (later known as discriminating collectors) was particularly effective. One of Halpert’s first clients was Abby Aldrich, wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who filled her many homes and two museums with purchases from Halpert’s galleries. The online records identify what Abby bought, where it was exhibited, and what she gave to various public institutions. Halpert was a first-class record keeper, the result, no doubt, of her formative years spent working in her mother’s candy store and in various retail and investment firms in New York City. Aside from having a keen eye for quality, she was an especially astute businesswoman, buying into a market that was still grossly undervalued. She offered payment plans and rentals, collected commissions for finding inventory for the gallery, and brokered sales to public institutions. For expensive items such as works by Edward Hicks (1780–1849), she proved how resourceful she could be by offering auction houses and galleries a shared interest in what she purchased. She also could be generous to the institutions that supported the gallery. Halpert acquired Miss Tweedy of Brooklyn (fig. 3a) in 1940, exhibited it in her gallery in 1941, then gave it as a gift to the Detroit Institute of Arts . 4 Fig. 8: Edward Hicks (1780–1849), The Grave of William Penn, ca. 1847/1848. Oil on canvas, 23¾ x 29¾ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1980.62.12); Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. Archives of American Art, Downtown Gallery Records Reel 5559, frame 748-749.