GreenBkk Auto | Outside Boston, the Charming Larz Anderson Auto Museum

Outside Boston, the Charming Larz Anderson Auto Museum

Sheldon Steele, the new curator and director of public programs at the Larz Anderson Museum in Brookline, Mass., with the 1933 Chrysler CQ (foreground) and 1934 Chrysler Airflow.

The Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Mass., which bills itself as “America’s oldest car collection,” recently named a new curator and director of public programs, Sheldon Steele, who spoke of the museum’s origins in a recent interview at the museum.

Larz and Isabel Anderson bought their first automobile, a Winton Runabout, in 1899, Mr. Steele said, and lodged it in the grand stable — resembling a towered Renaissance castle — previously occupied by horses and carriages. The family, who were wealthy socialites, acquired a new vehicle almost every year thereafter, and the stable became a garage.

In 1948, the Anderson family donated the carriage house and its collection of vehicles along with the surrounding estate to the town of Brookline. Now, only a part of the original group of vehicles remain, but their display is supplemented by temporary exhibitions.

Mr. Steele also showed off the museum’s current shows. “Curve Appeal: Style and Elegance in Automobile Design” is devoted to streamline models. It includes a 1934 Chrysler Airflow, a 1953 Cadillac Eldorado and a rare 1935 Stout Scarab, borrowed from the Detroit Historical Museum/Society. Mr. Steele pointed out the rotating seats in the Scarab and folding tables set up for the show with period Fiestaware.

“It was the first minivan,” he said.

The Larz Anderson Museum on German Car Day last June.

The Airflow’s back seat was the first to hold three passengers comfortably, Mr. Steele said. He also pointed out the curved side lamps of the Airflow’s interior. “That teardrop shape was the symbol of the streamline era,” he said. It epitomized smooth flow of air around a gracefully curved shape in motion. Later, jet planes inspired auto design.

“You see the Eldorado has this faux air scoop, suggesting a jet plane,” Mr. Steele said.

Also on display, through May, are drawings by Theodore Pietsch from the collection of Jean and Frederic Sharf. Mr. Sharf is a leading collector of automobile design drawings.

Mr. Pietsch worked as a designer for Chrysler during the 1930s, when he offered up a variety of designs for the Star Car, a small model that was never produced, but which bears striking resemblance to the Volkswagen Beetle.

He went on to work for other companies later, and his son, Theodore Pietsch III, sought out Mr. Sharf after reading about him in The New York Times. The younger Mr. Pietsch has donated some of his father’s notebooks and drawings to the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University and to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Mr. Pietsch worked at Hudson, Chrysler, American Motors and Studebaker, where he offered sketches for pickup trucks and the Avanti sports car. He was a master of the air brush; some of his drawing equipment is included in the show at the Larz Anderson museum.

The museum also sponsors regular gatherings of local collectors in its surrounding park, along with lectures and other automotive-themed events. The so-called lawn events include days devoted to Italian, German, British or American models, along with tuner cars, trucks, and hot rods. But inside the museum galleries, the horses who once lived there are memorialized by varnished signs with gold letters bearing their names.

Credit: The New York Times