AFA Summer 2020

Summer 82 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com BRITISH MASTERWORKS Ninety Years of Collecting at Colonial Williamsburg by Ronald L. Hurst and Margaret Beck Pritchard C olonial Williamsburg began acquiring furnishings for the town’s newly restored buildings in the early 1930s. Founder John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s vision was that the institution’s holdings “should become second to no collection of its kind in the country.” The curators of those first decades consequently sought out the finest available British and American antiques. They bought objects of intrinsic beauty and superior craftsmanship as well as those of historical significance. For decades, quantities of these magnificent, richly embellished antiques graced the interiors of the Capitol, Governor’s Palace, Raleigh and Wetherburn’s Taverns, and the Wythe, Randolph, and Everard houses. However, by the 1970s, new research revealed that even the wealthiest Virginians of the Revolutionary era had instead preferred goods in the so-called “neat and plain” style. Soon many of the objects were removed from Williamsburg’s historic buildings and placed in storage. With the expansion of Colonial Williamsburg’s Art Museums, many of the British fine and decorative arts in the collection have been recently conserved and put on view in a long-term installation, British Masterworks: Ninety Years of Collecting at Colonial Williamsburg . These splendors of British material culture will continue to represent Mr. Rockefeller’s desire to “stir the interest of people all over the country.” Thanks to the keen eyes and refined tastes of the institution’s earliest curators, Colonial Williamsburg is home to one of the finest assemblages of British decorative arts in America.