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Articles
Winthrop Chandler (1747–1790) is the first known American artist to paint American landscapes that have survived. The artists who painted American landscapes prior to Chandler are either unknown, were not born in America, or if they were, did not paint…
We now recognize Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) as one of America’s great artists of the nineteenth century. Further, many believe his work done in Maine includes some of his most important images, with Twilight in the Wilderness (Fig. 1), based…
In 1950, Andrew Wyeth completed a large, dark, and unsettling painting of three vultures flying above the Pennsylvania countryside (Fig.1). He called the work Soaring. The product of an unusually long and somewhat tumultuous creative gestation, this magisterial view of…
A constant complaint voiced by early settlers of Philadelphia and its environs was that “they scarcely knew how time passed, nor that they hardly knew the day of Rest, or the Lord’s day, when it was.”1 William Penn (1644–1718), Pennsylvania’s…
Philadelphia was founded in 1684, decades behind Boston, Massachusetts (1630), Newport, Rhode Island (1624), and New York City (1639). Nonetheless, thanks to the navigable Delaware River, Pennsylvania’s rich farmland, and the tolerant attitude of its founding fathers, it quickly grew…
Old Sturbridge Village recently had the rare opportunity to purchase two important Nathan Lombard (1777–1847) furniture pieces: a drop-leaf table and a chest of drawers (Figs.1, 2). In recent years, Nathan Lombard has gained widespread acclaim for his intricately inlaid…
Schoolgirl academies, especially in New England, have been the subject of extensive investigation during the last ninety years. Pioneering researchers such as Ethel Bolton and Eva Coe, Glee Krueger, Jane Nylander, Joan Stephens, and especially Betty Ring have identified the…
When Ronald G. Pisano and I began to frequent New York galleries, private dealers, and auctions in the early 1970s, in-depth research on American art and artists was pretty much in its infancy. Few universities had art history programs geared…
From 1918 until 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) lived for part of the year at Alfred Stieglitz’s (1864–1946) family estate in Lake George, located in New York’s Adirondack Park. The thirty-six-acre property was situated along the western shore, in the southern…
Today, with GPS and MapQuest at our fingertips, maps often function simply as navigational tools, but historically they played a much more diverse role, shaping everything from commercial to social activities. Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience at Winterthur…
For more than thirty years, Philadelphians Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz––he is a lawyer, she is a ceramicist––have been drawn to the work of self-taught artists, individuals who are not trained in art schools, do not earn a living as artists,…
Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and his work have been endlessly described, critiqued, analyzed, dissected, and reassembled, both during his lifetime and since he left this world almost half a century ago. He has been stereotyped by the images that stay fixed…
Belair Mansion in Bowie, Maryland, was completed in 1747 for Maryland governor Samuel Ogle and his wife, Anne Tasker Ogle. Known by their contemporaries as tastemakers and avid horse enthusiasts, Belair originally functioned as a summer home, profitable tobacco plantation,…
Part of the excitement of collecting is the discovery. Such is the case with the blanket chest in the front entry. Sold at a farm auction in Pennsylvania, it was covered with dirt, obscuring the painted surface. The collectors had…
In 1928, novelist Sinclair Lewis purchased a three-hundred-acre farm in Barnard, Vermont, as a wedding gift for his bride, foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson. The property, Twin Farms, which was first cultivated in 1793, soon became the hub of the couple’s…
Since 1845 Boston’s New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) has been collecting, preserving, and interpreting materials that tell the stories of America’s families. While “doing one’s genealogy” has always been a popular pastime, “who we are and where we’ve come…
A remarkable group of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century birth records has survived. Attributed to the “New Jersey Artist,” the twenty records were created for fourteen prosperous families of English descent living in Burlington County, New Jersey. Beginning in 1677, Burlington County…
A window was opened in early 2007 on a prominent eighteenth-century Salem cabinetmaker’s business with the discovery of the ledgers of Nathaniel Gould (1734–1781) at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The documents consist of two day, or waste, books, the first…
“Should you make the purchase, we will have more of the Monets than I think we will care for, but it strikes me we can sell some of those we now have, and thereby greatly improve our collection.” With this,…
In 2009 the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem, North Carolina, more than doubled its collection of Georgia-made decorative arts. The museum celebrated this achievement with an exhibit entitled “A Land of Liberty and Plenty”: Georgia…
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