‘Immigrant gifts’: Alphonso Trumpbour Clearwater, colonial silver and the limits of ‘Americanization’, 1906-1933

Conlin, Jonathan (2025) ‘Immigrant gifts’: Alphonso Trumpbour Clearwater, colonial silver and the limits of ‘Americanization’, 1906-1933. Journal of the History of Collections, 37 (1), 85-102. (doi:10.1093/jhc/fhae041).

Record type: Article

Abstract

The Clearwater Bequest of 1933 is a landmark in the development of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's holdings of American silver, and in the American Colonial Revival more broadly. Alphonso Trumpbour Clearwater (1848-1933) was a judge, antiquary and pillar of society in Kingston, New York. Drawing on the Clearwater papers at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, as well as his correspondence with curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums, this essay considers the origin in late nineteenth-century fairs of Clearwater's collecting of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century silver; his evolving taste and relations with dealers, curators and rival collectors in the decades before and after the opening of the Metropolitan's American Wing (1924); and the interaction of his views on what kind of silver 'belonged' in his collection with his views on what kind of people did and did not 'belong' in the United States.

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