CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art announced Thursday that it has appointed Ada de Wit, curator of works of art and sculpture at The Wallace Collection in London, as its new curator of decorative art.
A native of Wroclaw, Poland who has worked at The Wallace Collection for eight years, de Wit will start her new job in Cleveland on Aug. 1. She’ll succeed Stephen Harrison, who left the museum in 2020 after 15 years to join the Museum of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, N.Y., where he has been promoted to director and chief curator.
Stephen Harrison, curator of decorative art and design at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been appointed deputy director of the Museum of Art at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NYMunson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute
The appointment of de Wit brings the Cleveland museum’s curatorial staff to 18, with one new vacancy created by the retirement in January of Sue Bergh, who served for 22 years as the curator of pre-Columbian and Native American art.
“I’m absolutely thrilled, delighted, excited, really happy,’’ to join the Cleveland museum, de Wit said earlier this week in a Zoom call from Vienna.
She said the Cleveland museum has “a world-class collection of decorative art’’ that makes it relevant to the public and to scholars, and that it “provides countless research opportunities.”
William Griswold, the Cleveland museum’s director, said in a news release that “Ada is a brilliant, sophisticated scholar whose breadth of interest, knowledge, and experience is remarkable.’’ He added that de Wit “will immeasurably enrich the development of our collection and future special exhibitions.”
In Cleveland, de Wit will oversee roughly 5,000 objects in the museum’s collection of European and American decorative art from 1500 to the present. That’s a jump up from The Wallace Collection, where de Wit cares for roughly 1,000 objects.
The Cleveland job was attractive not only because the museum’s collection, which encompasses more than 65,000 objects overall, “is on a different scale,’’ but also because of its quality, de Wit said.
Then, too, it’s important to her that the Cleveland museum’s endowment, worth $875 million as of last fall, provides millions of dollars a year for new acquisitions. (Income from half of the endowment is reserved for art purchases. The rest is dedicated to operations and maintenance.)
The Wallace Collection, donated to the British Nation in 1897, was formed by the Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace and is displayed in Hertford House in London’s Manchester Square. The collection, with roughly 5,000 objects, includes masterpieces by Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Murillo, Velazquez, Canaletto, and Fragonard.
De Wit said the collection is akin to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which was formed by its namesake collector and philanthropist in a Venetian-style mansion in Boston’s Back Bay.
“When you go to the museum, you feel like you’re in a private house,’’ de Wit said, describing the Wallace Collection.
In a new exhibition at Hertford House in 2018, de Wit curated the inaugural exhibition, “Sir Richard Wallace: The Collector.” The Guardian called it “a sumptuous survey of art and opulence, a portrait of the art collector as dreamer.”
De Wit’s assignments in Cleveland will include a multi-year project to reinstall the galleries devoted to 18th-century French and German art.
She said she has known about the collection for years and has frequently used images of the Cleveland museum’s large, 18th-century silver tureen, a French Rococo masterpiece designed by Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, in her lectures.
“Tureen” by Juste-Aurele Meissonnier. Image courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art. Image courtesy of The Cleveland
During his years at the museum, Harrison worked on exhibitions focusing on late 19th- and early 20th-century decorative arts including “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,’’ a 2017 project co-organized with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York; a 2013 show on Cleveland goldsmith John Paul Miller; and a 2009 show entitled “Artistic Luxury: Faberge, Tiffany, Lalique.’’
De Wit said she has focused more on European decorative arts from the 17th and 18th centuries, but that she’s interested in exploring other areas of art history including American decorative art, and the works of local contemporary artists in Cleveland.
The Cleveland museum’s news release about de Wit’s appointment notes that she is an internationally recognized expert on the Anglo-Dutch sculptor and woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1741).
She co-organized an international conference on Gibbons in London in 2022, and authored the recently published book, “Grinling Gibbons and His Contemporaries (1650–1700): The Golden Age of Woodcarving in the Netherlands and Britain.”
Grinling Gibbons is represented in the Cleveland collection by an overmantel decoration carved in lindenwood and an overdoor decoration carved in limewood, both 17th century. The overmantel decoration is on view in the museum’s recently reinstalled British galleries.
– Eighteenth-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, left, and Thomas Lawrence, right, flank a monumental mantel in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s British gallery. Over the mantel, is a portrait by Peter Lely, and above it is a painstakingly restored overmantel decoration carved in lindenwood by Grinling Gibbons. It once hung above the fireplace in the Green Drawing Room of the Earl of Essex at Cassiobury in Watford, near London. Steven Litt, Cleveland.comSteven Litt, Cleveland.com
Before her work at the Wallace Collection, de Wit researched and cataloged the glass collection at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
De Wit earned a doctorate from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands; her Master of Arts in art history is from the University of Wroclaw, Poland. She has a second Master of Arts in decorative art and historic interiors is from the University of Buckingham in collaboration with the Wallace Collection.
De Wit has a special interest in metalwork, and silver, in particular, because her birthplace, Wroclaw, has a strong silversmithing tradition. To understand the material better, she took a silversmithing course at The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University.
“You need to have a practical understanding of the material,’’ she said. The class “gave me the confidence to talk about silver. I understand how it feels to hammer a sheet of metal, how it behaves, and that also allowed me to appreciate certain pieces, such as the tureen in Cleveland.”
