AFA Winter 2017

Winter 70 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com T he Biggs Museum of American Art is the only institution working to give national attention to the full range of artistic achievement and cultural strength within Delaware and the Greater Delmarva region. The year 2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the museum’s location on the Delaware state capital’s impressive Legislative Mall (Fig. 1). Since the passing in 1993 of museum founder Sewall C. Biggs, the collection has continued to grow through public sponsorship, private philanthropy, careful choices, and significant good fortune. After sixty plus years of collecting, Sewell C. Biggs (Fig. 2) left behind an institution rich in early mid-Atlantic furniture, especially from Philadelphia and Delaware, and portraiture by regional limners of the period before 1825. He collected exceptional local colonial silver and works by members of the Charles Willson Peale family of artists. Reportedly urged by the collector Lee B. Anderson to acquire nineteenth-century American landscape paintings and sculpture, Biggs also found a niche within at Distinguishing the Biggs Museum of American Art by Ryan Grover