Clement, Arthur W. (Arthur Wilfred), 1878-

Arthur W. Clement was born in 1878, the son of a Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Nathaniel Holmes Clement. He attended Yale College (class of 1900) and after graduating from New York Law School in 1902, he worked for the law firms of Cravath & Henderson and Tipple & Plitt. He became a partner at the firm of Bigham, Englar, Jones & Houston.

He served as a trustee of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Governing Committee of the Brooklyn Museum, beginning in 1943. He was elected vice-chairman of the Committee in 1944. In addition, he was elected director of the Kings County Trust Company and was a member of the New York City Bar, the Maritime Law Association and the Century Association of Manhattan (1945-1952). He also served as president of the Rembrandt Club of Brooklyn, a social club for art patrons and collectors.

He was exceedingly interested in art, especially early American pottery, ceramics and china, and traveled throughout the United States, Western Europe and Central America, acquiring ceramics, which he would donate to the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Newark Museum. He was an avid collector of early American ceramics and wrote and lectured on this subject extensively. In addition to conducting thorough research on early potters, he also lectured and published articles, catalogs, and pamphlets on other early American decorative arts, the art of collecting, and object research. Among these are The Gentle Art of Collecting and Our Pioneer Potters, in addition to articles in Antiques magazine and The New York Times.

After donating his vast American ceramics collection to the Brooklyn Museum, he assisted the curators in installing the objects in a new gallery dedicated to ceramics in 1944. He also worked with curators in the decorative arts department at the Brooklyn Museum on exhibitions of American pottery, pewter, and glass, to name a few, and at the Newark Museum. Clement died on October 31, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York.