Young Scholar Lectures at 2024 Delaware Antiques Show

The Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library’s 2024 Delaware Antiques Show opens this week, and the Decorative Arts Trust is proud to once again sponsor lectures by Lois F. McNeill Fellows in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.

Steven Baltsas, Lanah Swindle, and Graham Titus will share recent research with decorative arts enthusiasts during the Young Scholar Lectures at Chase Center on the Riverfront on Saturday, November 16, at 2:00 pm.

In the presentation Of the Earth: Neoclassicism and Natural History in a Philadelphia Center Table, Steven Baltsas will show how a talented cabinetmaker in Antebellum Philadelphia harnessed the city’s insatiable attraction to ancient and natural history in his creation of a superlative center table. Inlaid with a floral brass band set against flame-like mahogany crotch veneer, this peerless Classical table testifies to intellectual culture’s impact on furniture design in the early-19th-century Atlantic world.

In her lecture “To Imitate China”: A Close Reading of a Pair of 18th-Century Hand-Screens, Lanah Swindle grapples with imagery preserved on a pair of 18th-century hand-screens. The survival of these objects, made between 1759 and 1770 for fashionable circles in London and Paris, presents an opportunity to reflect on the dissemination of racial stereotypes of Chinese people through decorative art forms made by and for Euro-Atlantic audiences in the 18th century.

Graham Titus will present Performance and Pleasure at the Early Modern Table, featuring a 17th-century glass salver in Winterthur’s collection. By 1650, a nascent English glass industry supplied elite diners with the tableware necessary for increasingly luxurious and performative feasts. In this talk, Titus will explore changing practices and foodways at a defining moment of transition in dining.

Visit the Delaware Antiques Show website to learn how to purchase tickets and to attend these lectures, as well as the Saturday morning lecture by Barbara Frelinghuysen Israel and the Sunday lectures by Christopher Malone and Trevor Brandt. To learn more about the Decorative Arts Trust’s lecture sponsorship and grant programs, visit our Emerging Scholars Program overview.