"He was a remarkable man," museum director Anne d'Harnoncourt said Thursday. "He was always thinking how to enrich the significance of the relationships of the works of art."
Mr. Dietrich served on the Art Museum's board of trustees for 36 years, until December, and in 1972 was one of the founders of the museum's American Art Advisory Committee.
Before buying a piece, he researched and consulted with experts with an eye toward having the works seen by the public, son H. Richard III said. His father believed, he said, that items could tell fascinating stories if displayed in the proper context.
A piece of Chinese export porcelain, for example, would be far more revealing if paired with a portrait of the merchant who sold it and the sea captain who bought it, the son said.
Mr. Dietrich also collected articles used by people of modest means, such as Pennsylvania German Fraktur - handwritten and colorfully ornamented records of births, baptisms and marriages. He bought early paintings of the West and the Indian way of life that introduced the frontier to Easterners.
In 2002, for the Art Museum's 125th anniversary, Mr. Dietrich donated a richly carved, upholstered, mahogany chair made for Revolutionary War Gen. John Cadwalader by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Thomas Affleck.
The chair joined other furnishings once owned by the Cadwaladers in their Society Hill home - portraits of the family, a silver set, and a card table made in Affleck's shop - in an 18th-century parlor installed in a museum gallery. The effect allows museum visitors to imagine what the room might have looked like when George and Martha Washington called on the Cadwaladers for tea.
