Foreword

I wish to record our great sense of loss at the death of Andrew Oliver, our President. This sense of loss was evidenced to us by the great outpouring of friends at his funeral service at the Church of the Advent. Andy was a very engaging person, possessed of a quiet elegance, wit, and charm that drew people to him. Few could match him as an entertaining speaker and versifier. Highly intelligent and serious-minded, he was also deeply religious and a devoted family man.

Andy had the gift of seeming to do things easily. Yet he was a hard worker. How else could he have produced the series of books which he brought out in a relatively few years? He began with Faces of a Family then the volumes of the portraits of John and Abigail Adams, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams, the Diary of Samuel Curwen, the Edouard silhouettes, and others. Until the time of his death he was busily engaged in new ventures, not the least of which was the catalogue of the paintings in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

All of us connected with institutions—historical or otherwise—have good reason to be grateful to Andrew Oliver. His benefactions to institutions located in a geographical range from New England to Virginia—and possibly some beyond that—were quietly made. Fritz Allis for this society and colleagues for others can testify to that. Looking back over my years at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I know that our great collections of Oliver family papers could not have been assembled without Andy’s assistance, and the Notebook of John Smibert might not have been published so quickly, had he not produced the money for it.

In the organizations with which Andy was associated he inevitably moved up to high office. He was a conservative politically. I doubt that Andy would have found membership in the Americans for Democratic Action attractive. I have often thought that he would have been perfectly at home in the able Hutchinson-Oliver group that ran affairs in Massachusetts before the American Revolution and against which John Adams sputtered. Yet in a Tavern Club skit based on that early period, Andy’s lively sense of fun prompted him to play the part of John Adams, while Tom Adams played the then current Andrew Oliver.

We do not often come upon a man like Andrew Oliver, who meant so much to so many of our local and national institutions. We shall miss him for his many kindnesses, his profound interest in what we were trying to do, and above all for friendliness and humor that never failed to make our days brighter.