AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 75 directions and to illuminate new relationships within the museum’s galleries. The modern and contemporary art collections are among the fastest growing portions of the Biggs Museum. As examples of national trends of the past hundred years are added to expand Mr. Biggs’ collection, much of the most exciting work being collected was made within the Mid-Atlantic region, and especially Delaware. Juxtaposed above this treasure of Loockerman material seen in figure 6, is A Map of the World (2006) by Townsend, Delaware, resident Mary Tobias Putman, winner of the Hassam, Speicher, Betts & Symons Purchase Fund Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This minimalist landscape pictures the timeless fishing village of Leipsic on the Delaware Bay only a few miles from the Biggs Museum. The juxtaposition of periods is evident in other displays as well (Fig. 7). The museum has enjoyed tremendous success in looking to the nearby areas of the Chesapeake and southeast Pennsylvania to find relevant and related objects such as the wainscot chair dating from 1720–50, and documented to the Samuel England family of Cecil County, Maryland, a few miles outside Newark, Delaware. With a dearth of known early Delaware-made examples, the chair represents the type of furniture that would have been made and used within the state. Maryland has also provided contemporary points of view that dovetail perfectly with the region’s best-known artistic legacies. Michael Robear of Cecil County, Maryland, created Untethered (2009), in response to the death of Andrew Wyeth, a life-long inf luence in his surreal aesthetic formulated at the Corcoran School of Art (fig. 7). The Biggs Museum recently purchased at auction the portraits of Tench and Elizabeth Turbutt Francis (ca. 1740) by Robert Feke ( ca. 1705 or 1707–ca. 1752) (Fig. 8). Now the earliest portraits within the collection, the couple lived in Kent County, Maryland, just miles from Dover, in the service of Lord Baltimore until relocating to Philadelphia in the 1740s. Through new partnerships, the museum has added an entire new gallery in recent years, with several examples of artworks created in the state’s two artist colonies: Arden, established north of Wilmington in 1900, and the Rehoboth Art League, opened in 1938 in Sussex County. The over-mantel coastal scene entitled Far View (Fig. 9) is by Ethel Pennewill Brown Leach (1878–1960), a student of Howard Pyle and co-founder of the Rehoboth Art League. The work is among the largest and most ambitious of Leach’s paintings of the lighthouse at Cape Henlopen, which fell into the ocean in 1926. Below it is a Mission-style sideboard that is part of a dining room created by the son of Arden founder, Frank Stephens, for his brother’s 1914 wedding. Woodworking was one of several arts- and-crafts industries that flourished in Arden’s utopian society. Others included the Arden forge that created the sideboard’s medieval-inspired hardware. Fig. 8 : Robert Feke (1701-1751), Tench Francis, ca. 1740. Oil on canvas, each 43 x 36 inches. Museum purchase (2015.2.1). Fig. 9 : Ethel Pennewill Brown Leach (1878–1959), Far View, before 1926. Oil on canvas, 29½ x 62¼ inches. Museum purchase (2010.6); Sideboard, 1914, by Don Stephens (1887–1971). Oak, iron. Gift of the estate of Caroline Stephens Holt (2011.1.1). Photo by Andrew Dalton.