Antiques Dealer's Association in the News

Morrison H. Heckscher: ADA Award of Merit Recipient

[From The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2011]

There is a history in all men’s lives

William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, scene 1, line 75

Morrison H. Heckscher, the Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be presented with the 2011 Award of Merit by the Antiques Dealers’ Association of America on April 9. It is an award well deserved, as readers of this magazine are assuredly aware. In addition to his extensive scholarship in the fields of eighteenth-century furniture and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American architecture, Morrie has contributed mightily to how we perceive the whole of American decorative arts.

Raised in Philadelphia, Morrie ascribes the trajectory of his life’s path to a quartet of teachers and mentors: art historian Samuel M. Green at Wesleyan University (from which he received a B.A. in 1962); Charles F. Montgomery, in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture (M.A., 1964); Adolph K. Placzek, Avery Librarian, Columbia University (Ph.D., 1986); and A. Hyatt Mayor, the legendary curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a Chester Dale Fellow, Morrie was assigned to Mayor after being hired by

James J. Rorimer, the larger-than-life director of the Metropolitan Museum, in 1966. Two years later he moved to the American Wing, and that has been his domain ever since. Beyond the museum, Morrie has served on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians, the American Friends of Attingham, and Scenic Hudson, and he is currently a trustee of the Winterthur Museum, Gar- den and Library—as well as a member of the Walpole Society and the Century Association.

He is a man of taste, wit, and warmth whose keen eye for connoisseurship and beauty is matched by an ear just as finely tuned to the nuances of language. With a wealth of knowledge accrued from a lifelong devotion to books—which he both reads and collects—he is a writer of clarity and grace, as well as an engaging conversationalist.

Withal, Morrie is a public man but a very private person, who deeply loves his wife, Fenella—a British-born, Oxford-trained, highly-gifted pediatric endocri- nologist—and reveres his friends and colleagues more than all his achievements and accolades. He loves New York and his abode on the West Side, adores his job and venerates the Metropolitan Museum, and he treasures Central Park, which he crosses daily on his walks to and from work. But perhaps the places he loves most passionately are his nineteenth-century Gothic revival weekend house up the Hudson River near Newburgh (which he has been in the process of restor- ing for several decades now) and his rustic summer place on Louds Island off the

coast of Maine. An inkling of the devotion and perseverance that have brought him this far can be gleaned from how, when a friend in southeastern Pennsylvania offered him a 1950s Farmall Cub tractor to use on the property in Maine, he jumped at the chance. He loaded the tractor into a rental truck and headed north (Fenella gamely following in the family Volkswagen), across the George Washington Bridge, through the con- gested Bronx, and on into New England, arriving at midnight for a seven p.m. dinner party. A measure of the esteem others have for him: he was served dinner—or at least a drink—and the next morning neighbors and lobstermen secured the tractor onto a raft and hauled it to the island, where it is still operable today.

I first met Morrie in 1963 when his class of Winterthur Program fellows was on their New England tour and I was working on the Adams Papers project at the Massachusetts Historical Society. They came to dine with me in the seventeenth-century Cooper-Frost-Austin House, where I was living, and gratefully consumed a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs. A man of tradition, to this day, Morrie tells me, when the Winterthur fellows visit New York, he offers them the same menu—and it is just as gratefully consumed.

Most importantly, Morrie Heckscher is who he seems to be. And that brings to mind the line in Macbeth: “More is thy due than more than all can pay.” –Wendell Garrett