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Philadelphia's second-floor galleries are a series of period rooms, christened the "Main Street of the Ages." They range from a medieval cloister to a Pennsylvania Dutch parlor. On the first floor are the supplementary study collections: ceramics, glass, textiles, laces, metals, ivories, etc. The period rooms are the museum's pride. One of Director Kimball's favorites is an English Tudor room from a hunting lodge of Henry VIII. Its donor, staid Publisher William L. McLean of the staid Philadelphia Bulletin, would turn in his grave if he could hear genial Fiske Kimball halt in it, boom out: "This may be the very room in which Queen Elizabeth was conceived!"
The Philadelphia Museum was the first, and has been by far the biggest, museum recipient of WPA funds—$1,335,000 to date, with more in immediate prospect. In order to get WPA grants, the museum listed its paintings, sculpture, furniture as "materials," thus easily matched the Government allotment dollar for dollar. Once Director Kimball explained this process to President Nelson A. Rockefeller of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Said Mr. Rockefeller: "I see, you borrowed the money, then got the Government to double it, and then got people to give it to you." This quip rouses a loud and happy laugh from ample-chested Fiske Kimball.
For the last ten years Director Kimball has been leading rich Philadelphians into the museum's basement to what he calls "my little gift shoppe"—the famed Foulc Collection, which he bought at half-price just after the market crash with borrowed money guaranteed by his trustees. There prospective "buyers" who felt inclined to make an impressive gift to the museum could "buy" anything from a 17th-Century wrought-iron fire set ($50) to a complete stone choir screen ($150,000). When a "sale" was made, the gift was taken upstairs and installed in an appropriate period setting, complete with a neat brass plaque honoring the donor. Fiske Kimball's gift shoppe has less than $150,000 worth of unredeemed art left.
Such Kimball coups have built the Philadelphia Museum. But modest Fiske Kimball refuses to take credit for them, has a beautifully simple explanation for the museum's success. "First we exploited the boom," says he. "Then we exploited the depression."