His grandfather, Morris Harris, made furniture as a hobby and inspired his grandson's youthful dream of moving to rural Vermont to become a cabinetmaker.
[1][2] Heckscher arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1966 under a Chester Dale Fellowship to work with English architectural drawings in the prints department.
[1][2][3] Heckscher mounted numerous Met exhibitions with accompanying catalogs: In Quest of Comfort: The Easy Chair in America (1971), An Architect and His Client: Frank Lloyd Wright and Francis W. Little (1973), The Architecture of Richard Morris Hunt (1986), American Rococo: Elegance in Ornament, 1750–1775 (with Leslie Greene Bowman, 1992), American Furniture and the Art of Connoisseurship (1998); John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker (2005); The Metropolitan Museum of Art: An Architectural History, 1870–1995 (1995); and Creating Central Park (2008).
II: Queen Anne and Chippendale Styles (1985) won the Charles F. Montgomery Award of the Decorative Arts Society.
[6] The couple owns a rustic summer home on Louds Island in Maine and a Gothic Revival house near Newburgh in upstate New York, in addition to an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan.