Exhibition Review

	In galleries five, six, and seven of "Art and the Empire City," the extended sight lines of the large rooms convey the growth both of the city and of the market for luxury goods in the 1840s and 1850s. Bertel Thorvaldsen's Ganymede and the Eagle (1817-1829) is in the center foreground; Hiram Powers's Greek Slave (carved in 1847) is in the center middle ground. Both statues were displayed at the New York Crystal Palace exhibition in 1853. Two manikins dressed in gowns worn to the Prince of Wales Ball in New York in 1860 are in the center distance. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

In the early 1990s, historians of both New York City and American art began to hear rumors that the Americanists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were planning a major exhibition exploring the visual and material culture of antebellum Gotham. By the middle of the decade, John K. Howat and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, organizers of "Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861," were hosting seminars in which they solicited advice from a remarkably wide range of academic and museum scholars. I was privileged to be one of those consulted. Almost a decade in the planning, "Art and the Empire City" opened at the Metropolitan in September 2000. The exhibition featured more than three hundred objects, including many well-known American genre paintings, landscapes, and sculptures. But the main focus of the show lay elsewhere, drawing attention to less familiar and, in many cases, rarely exhibited examples of glass, ceramics, silver, dress, furniture, architectural drawings, prints, maps, and photographs. Most of the objects were made in New York, but some were manufactured in other parts of the United States and a substantial number were imported from Europe. What they all had in common was that they were either made by individuals living in New York, were publicly displayed in New York, were owned by New Yorkers, or were selected (and clearly labeled) as substitutes for unavailable objects that met at least one of those criteria. "Art and the Empire City" did not live up to all of my hopes for it—I am not sure any show could have—but it was both a fascinating exhibition and a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the decorative arts of early-nineteenth-century New York.

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