Thrice has the Metropolitan Museum of Art been notably, spectacularly enriched by the munificent bequests of great and rich collectors. The John Pierpont Morgan and Benjamin Altman collections, both given in 1913, spread paintings, carvings, sculpture, jewelry, porcelains, tapestries, furniture through long galleries for the benefit of the U. S. public. And all last week thousands of people shuffled back and forth through four galleries, two corridors, to see the latest, possibly the greatest of the museum's gifts. At one bound the Metropolitan, already an imposing pile, became one of the world's greatest museums.
When Louisine Waldron Elder of Philadelphia was a small speculative girl in pigtails she carefully hoarded her pennies and bought a picture from elegant, irascible James A. McNeill Whistler. So impressed was Whistler with little Louisine's good judgment that he gratefully sent her copies of several of his etchings. That was the beginning of the collection exhibited last week. Years later Louisine met and married another collector, the late Henry Osborne Havemeyer, potent sugarman, President of American Sugar Refining Co. It was no longer necessary to save pennies. Together they wandered about the world, buying magnificently. It was Mr. Havemeyer, for whom the present collection is named, who bought the Old Masters. Mrs. Havemeyer, ever interested in what was new, eschewed dealers remembering Whistler. She bought directly from the artists whenever possible.
The paintings piled up. The Havemeyer house on 66th Street & Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, large as it was, began to look like a warehouse. When every inch of wall space was covered, Monets, Manets, Degas were piled in the closets. French bronzes and Japanese ivories found their way into Mr. Havemeyer's silk hats, among his collars. Exuberant, enthusiastic Mrs. Havemeyer kept on buying.
In her will, probated last January, she left to the Metropolitan Museum a specific group of 142 paintings and works of art to be known as the H. O. Havemeyer Collection. She directed that the Museum should also be given "all such other pictures, paintings, engravings, statuary and other works of art as my son Horace might appoint to it." No less generous than their mother, her son Horace and her daughters Adaline and Electra (now Mrs. Peter H. B. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Mrs. James Watson Webb) appointed and appointed until the H. O. Havemeyer Collection was bloated to 1.907 specific objects. More modest than other museum donors, Mrs. Havemeyer specified that her collection was not to be kept separate and sacrosanct but was to be split up and subdivided, after the original exhibition, among the proper museum departments.