43. Pitcher. British, ca. 1880. Designed by Christopher Dresser (British, 1834–1904). Linthorpe Pottery Works (1879–89). Glazed earthenware, H. 4 15/16 in. (12.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Florence and Herbert Irving, 2016 (2016.178.7) and waned over the course of its history, and by 1914, as scholars and amateurs alike sought to understand the having decided that such objects were not appropriate for history of the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. an art museum, The Met had largely stopped collecting Lavish folios and more accessibly scaled volumes ded- 39 American antiquities. In time the Museum came to regret icated to Peruvian antiquities were published in the this decision, and by the 1960s it had resumed collection second half of the nineteenth century, among them activities in this area. One of the 昀椀rst exhibitions of ancient Ephraim George Squier’s (1821–1888) in昀氀uential Peru: American art after this resumption of interest at The Met Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas 41 was devoted to Peruvian ceramics from the collection of (1877). Such publications, in tandem with the increased Nathan Cummings (1896–1985). A collector of nineteenth- prominence of collections on public display in museums, and twentieth-century European painting and sculp- inspired a number of artists, including the prominent ture as well as Peruvian pots, Cummings purchased two British industrial designer Christopher Dresser, who South American collections formed in the early twentieth counted Peruvian ceramics among his many wide-ranging century: one from the Wasserman family of Buenos Aires, interests. Dresser’s small pitcher with a strap handle and and the other from the Ga昀昀ron family, whose patriarch spout recalls both the shapes of ancient, South Coast practiced medicine in Lima and received pots as payments ceramics and the geometric patterning of Inca slip paint- for medical services. Cummings eventually gave half his ing (昀椀g. 43). collection to the Art Institute of Chicago and the other Expanding museum collections in Europe and Peru, half to The Met, where it was featured in an exhibition in along with the increased circulation of archaeological 1964. The Met’s collection has continued to grow since publications, provided a rich trove of imagery for art- that time, primarily with the watershed gifts of Nelson A. ists, who could employ the subject matter as a powerful Rockefeller (1908–1979), which established a new home allegory of strength and independence from Europe and for the display of ancient Peruvian ceramics (and other the colonial legacy. Paintings such as Francisco Laso’s traditions) in 1982.40 Inhabitant of the Peruvian Cordilleras (1855) incorporated Scienti昀椀c archaeology developed alongside the for- a representation of a Moche ceramic vessel—a prisoner 44 mation of museum collections in the nineteenth century, vessel—as a pivot around which the artist explored com-