In 1895, sisters Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt marshaled the forces of the Advisory Council of the Woman's Art School to open a museum at The Cooper Union, loosely based on their grandfather Peter Cooper's ambitions for a "museum of history, art & science". The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration was intended from the start to be "not only for the use of the scholars of the art school, but for the artisans in art generally, who will have free access to the rooms for the purpose of making copies and studying the models" (Annual Report, 1895).
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Over the following decades, the Museum accumulated thousands of items via donations; published a semi-annual Chronicle on collection development and museum happenings; and hosted exhibitions featuring a dizzying array of collections, including swords, ancient sewing implements, buttons, puppets, children's clothing, depictions of cats, lace, origami, wallpaper, neckties, pottery, and hatboxes. Sessions of two-dimensional design art classes were held in the museum, and engineering students received a tour of the museum as part of their required English course.
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Over time, however, the museum grew more and more pressed for space and funding. In 1963, a Cooper Union press release announced that the museum would be closed while the Metropolitan Museum of Art performed an audit of the collection, and warned that the end result might be a relocation of the museum. The public reacted strongly, no one more so than horticulturalist and antique furniture collector Henry Francis du Pont, who led the "Committee to Save the Cooper Union Museum." It was the actions of the Committee that brought the museum to the attention of the Smithsonian, who in 1967 formally acquired the contents of the museum. In 1976, the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration reopened in the former Carnegie mansion with a name that linked it back to both the women who founded it and the school in which it had resided: "Cooper-Hewitt, The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design."
Now known as the "Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum," the museum continues the mission of its founders to make design accessible to the public, and honored them as recently as this past summer with a show titled "Sarah & Eleanor Hewitt: Designing a Modern Museum."
Many thanks to Nathan Feniak A'24, whose HSS-4 paper on the dissolution of the Museum helped inform this post and can be found in the Cooper Union Archives & Special Collections.
Interested in learning more? Search the Records of The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration finding aid. If you'd like to view particular materials in person, please reach out to us at archives@cooper.edu.
Interested in supporting the preservation of Cooper history? You can become a Friend of the Cooper Union Library for as little as $25 (or as much as you want!) View our webpage on giving to the library for more information.
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