As part of the ongoing expansion and modernization of the Museum of the City of New York’s Fifth Avenue building, two Aesthetic Movement period rooms originally from the home of John D. Rockefeller at 4 West 54th Street have been gifted by the museum to two institutions, where they will be preserved, interpreted and made publicly accessible.
The dressing room and all its furnishings will go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the bedroom and all its furnishings will go to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
The removal and deaccessioning of the rooms were necessary because their dimensions could not be accommodated on the renovated floors. The Board of Trustees of the Museum of the City of New York opted to pay the significant costs of dismantling the rooms and to make them available to other museums so they remain on public view.
The rooms have a rich history. The West 54th Street townhouse of which they were a part was owned by Richmond native Arabella Worsham; they date to 1881, when she expanded and redecorated her 1865 home in the then-current Aesthetic style. After her marriage to the railroad and shipping magnate Collis P. Huntington, Worsham sold the home, fully furnished, to John D. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller and his family took possession of the townhouse in 1884 and made few changes in its décor during their occupancy. When the senior Rockefeller died in 1937, his son John D. Rockefeller Jr, donated three interiors †the master bedroom and the dressing room to the Museum of the City of New York and a Moorish smoking room, which is now on view at the Brooklyn Museum. At the Museum of the City of New York, the rooms remained open to the public for 70 years.
“We couldn’t be happier about this perfect outcome,” said Susan Henshaw Jones, the Ronay Menschel director of the Museum of the City of New York, where the two rooms have been on view since 1938. “We have been committed to finding new homes for these treasured interiors, and we have accomplished our overriding goal.”
Morrison H. Heckscher, Lawrence A. Fleischman chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing, said: “The transfer of the Rockefeller dressing room to the Metropolitan Museum is the result of an exemplary partnership and collaboration with the Museum of the City of New York. The room will be unveiled in its new location, adjacent to other remarkable American interiors of the late Nineteenth Century, as part of the ongoing American Wing renovation, and we look forward to presenting it to the public.”
Alex Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, said, “We applaud the Museum of the City of New York for their marvelous generosity toward the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. As our museum’s only period-room installation, the Worsham-Rockefeller interior will be a highlight of VMFA’s McGlothlin Galleries for American Art when our new McGlothlin Wing opens in 2010.”
For more information, 212-534-1672 or www.mcny.org.
