The collection of the Sewell C. Biggs Museum of American Art has been more than sixty years in the making and reflects its founder's lifelong passion for American fine and decorative arts, particularly those from Delaware and the Delaware Valley. The museum, which opened in 1993, boasts a collection of paintings, silver, furniture and other decorative arts dating from the mid eighteenth century through the twentieth century. This is the only collection in Delaware to provide such a full range of both fine and decorative arts.
Sewell C. Biggs was born in Middletown into a Delaware family with ties to nearby Maryland and to New Jersey. His grandfather, Sewell C. Biggs, was a farmer, being one of the first to develop peach orchards in Delaware. His great uncle Benjamin T. Biggs was a governor of Delaware (1887- 1891). As a youth, Sewell Biggs collected items ranging from starfish and sand dollars to confederate money and World War I artifacts and then displayed them in bookcases. He "wallpapered" his room with Frank E. Schoonover's magazine-cover illustrations for American boy and with pictures of World War I fighter planes. He also accompanied his parents, J. Frank and Emma L. Biggs, on their "antiquing" trips. He was graduated from Wilmington Friends School, the University of Delaware, the University of Virginia Law School, and was admitted to the Virginia Bar. He studied architecture at Harvard and architectural history at Oxford and Cambridge universities. A friend's gift of a marine picture spurred his interest in paintings. His interest in collecting artifacts was furthered by the acquisition of pastel portraits that James van Dyke had painted of members of the Beekman family, his father's ancestors. These paintings, never out of the family, were the gift from a cousin. He inherited a desk probably made in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for his great-grandfather Abraham Christopher Beekman (1789-1871), the subject of one of the pastels. The Beekman family had an association with early Delaware: following the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Peter Stuyvesant appointed Wilhelmus Beekman proprietor of all lands claimed by the Dutch in what is now Delaware and directed him to oversee the eviction of the Swedes.
It was after World War II, during which he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, that Mr. Biggs became and active collector. He began his efforts in Delaware, where he was also restoring an old farmhouse located near the Delaware River. He continued to collect when he later moved into his grandfather's mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse, south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Then, in the mid 1960s, he bought an apartment in New York City, where exposures to the museums, galleries and auctions helped him to become a serious collector. By studying the American art market and exhibitions, he became aware of objects that were especially important to the Delaware focus of his collection, such as Albert Browere's Recruiting Peter Stuyvesant's Army for the Recapture of Fort Casimir, included a California museum's 1978 exhibition of American genre paintings. As he became more focused on works with Delaware associations, he also became more persuasive in convincing other collectors to give appropriate objects to the collection, such as the group of eighteenth-century furniture from the Janvier family of cabinetmakers in Odessa, that his cousin, Marianna Janvier Brown donated.
In the late 1970s Mr. Biggs decided to encourage others, especially young people, to enjoy and pursue careers in the arts. He opened a gallery at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, to provide opportunities for artists, especially for those just beginning their careers, to exhibit and to sell their works. He regularly invited students from the art history department at the University of Delaware to visit his home to see and learn from the collections. In 2000 he endowed a chair in the art history department at the university to ensure that American art will continue to be a strength of that department.
Over the decade Mr. Biggs has refined the collection, upgrading to better examples, and because of space constraints, limiting the types of objects. He eliminated nonrepresentational works and narrowed the geographic focus to emphasize Delaware. Recently he has concentrated on adding to the collection forms that he had not previously included, such as a pair of "pretzel back" chairs, which provide another motif for the study of historical furniture design. His well trained eyes can brush past the dirt, grime and damage to discern the quality hidden underneath and can assess whether an object can be rescued and restored. He may have developed this expertise because in his early years as a collector, he did some of the restoration work himself. (Later he left those tasks to professional conservators.) His steadfast concern for originality and condition is reflected in the excellence of the additions that he continues to make to the collection.
In the early 1980s the Biggs Collection was on view at the Brick Hotel Gallery in Odessa, Delaware. Later in that decade, many of the twentieth-century paintings were exhibited at the Delaware Art Museum; over the years individual works have been displayed in temporary exhibitions at other museums. At the urging and with the help of Elise W. du Pont, Mr. Biggs entered into an agreement with the State of Delaware and a group of trustees to establish the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, the state capital, as the home of his collection. He has honored those whose names are inscribed on the wall in the Reception Hall, Delawareans such as Mabel Lloyd Ridgely, who contributed to the preservation of art and architecture but had not received the recognition due to them, and collectors such as Jessie Harrington and Charles Dorman whose research and publications encouraged him to focus on Delaware objects.
Although Mr. Biggs has had a lifelong interest in historic architecture and about 1960 even acquired paneling from the Thomas Shipley house (dating from ca.1759-ca. 1770) in Wilmington, he ultimately decided that a historic house type setting was unsuitable for his collection. At the Biggs Museum, he installed the objects in intimate galleries with objects arranged in chronological order that allows for a symmetrically balanced composition. Decorative arts are displayed with the paintings; and while a few architectural elements are present, there is no attempt to create period room settings. The background wall colors are muted, no object seems to obtrude, and all can be enjoyed individually. The museum's staff offers programs and special exhibitions to complement the Biggs collection, a collection that had already far outgrown the original space.