MESDA’s House Party Exhibition
BY MICHAEL J. BRAMWELL
MESDA’s House Party: R.S.V.P. B.Y.O.B. exhibition engages critically with inequities of power and violence that continue as material and cultural legacies within American decorative arts.
Teaching Needlework: Quaker Mother-Daughter Duo Elizabeth and Ann Marsh
BY ISABELLA ROSNER
Elizabeth and Ann Marsh taught the daughters of elite Quaker and non-Quaker Philadelphia families, establishing a needlework aesthetic popular throughout the Delaware Valley for more than a century.
Chinese Porcelain and Japanese Lacquerware in the Cabinets of Amalia van Solms-Braunfels
BY LAURYN SMITH
In the 1600s, wealthy and elite individuals began amassing extraordinary collections, composed of both locally produced and imported works of art. Few were as innovative as Amalia van Solms-Braunfels, Princess of Orange.
Optics and Enslavement in Charles Willson Peale’s Benjamin and Eleanor Laming
BY MICHAEL W. HARTMAN
A 1789 Maryland inventory recorded seven enslaved people—Beck and her children Juliet, Biddy, and Henry; Mary and her daughter Appolonia; and a man called Dick—as the property of Benjamin and Eleanor Laming, the subjects of a double portrait by Charles Willson Peale.
Nancy McClelland: Illuminating the Scope of Her Work Through the Lens of Electra Havemeyer Webb
BY MARGARET WOOD
Best known as an interior decorator and wallpaper historian, Nancy Vincent McClelland’s passion for wallpaper spanned decades. Throughout her nearly 60-year career, she studied, collected, produced, and used wallpapers in her practice.
Louise Brigham’s Box Furniture and the Long History of Democratic Design and Creative Reuse
BY JENA GILBERT-MERRILL
In 1909, a little-known artist and social reformer named Louise Brigham published Box Furniture: How to Make a Hundred Useful Articles for the Home, a collection of instructions for producing simple, modular furniture from repurposed wooden packing crates.
New Book Explores Luxury after the Terror
BY IRIS MOON
Luxury After the Terror explores the production, circulation, and survival of French luxury after the death of Louis XVI by focusing on decorative arts makers with strong ties to the monarchy and how they navigated the Terror and the world that it remade.
Book Review: The Story of the Country House
BY JESSIE DEAN
From its charming cover alone, this recent publication from Yale University Press caught our eye, but when multiple members recommended it, we knew The Story of the Country House: A History of Places & People by Clive Aslet was worthy of your attention.
