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Leslie H. Nash, watercolor and pencil maquette for an enamel bowl by Tiffany Studios, circa 1900, has been given to The Metropolitan Museum, which has the bowl in its collection.

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Harold Hals, designer, earthenware vase, circa 1900–1904, for Teco Art Pottery, 1889–circa 1930. Image ©2006 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. —Peter Harholdt photo

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), tall-back side chair, 1900, oak and leather. ©2007 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Five Museums Receive Gifts From ADA 1900 Early American Design Objects W/5 cuts

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NEW YORK CITY — The American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation has given gifts to five museums. ADA 1900 encourages appreciation for and understanding of early modern American decorative arts from 1880 to 1930, and has worked with museums across the United States as well as London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, supporting exhibitions, institutional collection development and scholarship in American design.

Bruce Barnes, founder of ADA 1900, has collected American furniture, metalwork, lighting and ceramics for more than 15 years. The foundation’s curator, Joseph Cunningham, has worked with the collection since 2000.

ADA 1900 has donated a watercolor and pencil maquette for an enameled copper bowl with a plum design by Tiffany Studios, circa 1900, to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has the actual bowl in its collection. This preparatory study for the enamel bowl features annotations that greatly deepen the understanding of Tiffany’s technical strategies. The maquette was given in honor of the late Catherine Hoover Voorsanger.

In honor of Cheryl Robertson, the Milwaukee Art Museum has received a side chair from “Rockledge,” the 1912 home designed by George Washington Maher. This form features strong Prairie School styling as well as elements of Japanesque design, and Maher’s signature arch in its crest rail. The chair, which retains its original leather upholstery and decorative tacking, joins the Milwaukee’s collection of Prairie School decorative arts and its Prairie archive of architectural renderings and documents related to George Mann Niedecken’s work.

ADA 1900 has donated a unique jardinière by Frederick Hurton Rhead to the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), in honor of Ellen Paul Denker. Made at the University City Pottery in St Louis in 1911, the jardinière is decorated with the British émigré’s scenic interpretation of the Midwestern landscape. The gift of this rare and important object joins outstanding ceramic works in the collection and recognizes the recent pioneering research, scholarship and exhibition on University City Pottery, spearheaded by independent curator and scholar Ellen Paul Denker and SLAM curators David Conradsen and Cara McCarty.

The Carnegie Museum of Art has received a vase by Teco, The Gates Pottery, in honor of Sarah Nichols. This rare form, made around 1900, features dramatic modernist styling and a cool powdery glaze typical of the best Teco ceramics. The vase demonstrates the virtuosity of the complexly molded forms made by this Chicago ceramics and terra cotta firm, which also executed works for Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Its architectonic design relates to the Carnegie’s holdings of architect-designed furniture and architectural drawings and documents, housed in the Heinz Architectural Center.

Finally, ADA 1900 donated a tall-back spindle side chair by Frank Lloyd Wright, in honor of David Hanks, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This chair, designed by Wright for the Warren Hickox House, 1899, in Kankakee, Ill., is among his earliest attempts at a rectilinear modernist chair design. This chair is the first piece of furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright to join the MFA Boston’s collection of American furniture.

For information, 212-501-9672 or jc@ads1900.org.