By Cara Caputo, WPAMC Class of 2021 With its paper covers and imitation leather spine, this flask would have easily blended in with a shelf of books, but once removed, its true function as a flask would have been immediately evident. Displayed in Winterthur’s Albany Room, this flask is not meant to deceive visitors [...]
By Bethany McGlyn, WPAMC Class of 2020 My first days at Winterthur were a whirlwind of introductions, tours, names, and dates. While I began this program with some knowledge of American decorative arts, I quickly realized how much I had to learn. So, when it came time to pick my first object to research, [...]
By Joseph Litts, WPAMC Class of 2020 Winterthur is very lucky to have a copy of Mart Gartside’s An Essay on Light and Shade on Colors and Composition in General. Printed in London in 1805, Light and Shade is gorgeous and fascinating. As she describes in the opening pages, Mary Gartside was a drawing teacher, frequently frustrated [...]
By James Kelleher, WPAMC Class of 2020 Fortunately for all of us, buildings don’t melt into air after they’re well studied. They continue to leave an impression on those who encounter them. Sometimes the impressions are shrugged off and easily forgotten, like the corner store or boilerplate apartment complexes. Sometimes, though, a building is [...]
By Erin Anderson, WPAMC Class of 2020 One of the oldest desks in Winterthur’s collection is a beautiful walnut slant-front desk in the William and Mary style. Slant-front desks are essentially an evolution of older forms of furniture. Desk boxes, also called “Bible boxes” were semi-portable writing surfaces. These were followed by the desk [...]
By Olivia Armandroff, WPAMC Class of 2020 While he had grown up in a luxuriously appointed New York mansion and spent time in his family’s polished Newport home, the famed Breakers, Alfred Glynn Vanderbilt elected to make his first major real estate investment in 1901 in the more simply outfitted Great Camp Sagamore, a [...]
By Emily Whitted, WPAMC Class of 2020 Catching a historical object in a state of incompleteness is rare: it seems counter-intuitive to preserve something that technically isn’t finished, especially when its original maker isn’t around to complete it. When trying to determine which object in Winterthur’s collection I should choose to spend serious quality [...]
By Anastasia Kinigopoulo, WPAMC Class of 2020 By mid-morning, the class warmed up in a cafe housed in the Assembly Rooms in Bath (UK), a building by architect John Wood the Younger which served as a dance hall and gathering place in the late 18th century. Never one to ignore an open door, I found [...]
By Elizabeth Palms, WPAMC Class of 2020 Two Fellows and I took to the drafting boards as part of our elective, Documentation of Historic Structures. Sponsored by the University of Delaware’s Center for Historic Architecture & Design (CHAD), this course afforded my classmates and me the incredible opportunity to conduct architectural history fieldwork once [...]
By Kate Budzyn, WPAMC Class of 2019 In preparation for an upcoming student-curated exhibition on shop interiors at Winterthur, each student researched a set of photographs from the Delaware Historical Society’s collection of historic images of local shop interiors. I was assigned to a gorgeous, Hopper-esque set of 1930s black-and-white images of Federal Bake [...]