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 [...]
By Elizabeth Humphrey, WPAMC Class of 2019 While browsing the shelves and glass cases at The Annex on Second, I noticed a bright red “National Goggles” box nestled next to mourning pendants, hair-work jewelry, and velvet gloves. Molly, the store’s proprietor, mentioned that she had found the goggles in her grandfather’s workshop. When I [...]
By Carrie Greif, WPAMC Class of 2019 By the time the Northern trip rolled around, I was deep in the thick of researching modernism in America for my upcoming thesis project on the previously undocumented mid-century modern furniture collection at Winterthur. I’d been cycling through a slew of influential texts that herald the philosophical [...]
By Katharine Fitzgerald, WPAMC Class of 2019 My favorite part of going on field studies with my Winterthur classmates is seeing new sides to places I thought I already knew. This year’s trip to southern New England opened my eyes to a new-to-me component of life in New England with visits to two historic [...]
By Brooke Baerman, WPAMC Class of 2019 Beauport, or the Sleeper-McCann House, is a 1907 mansion overlooking the rocky harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts. A visitor there will immediately notice that every room is a complete display in itself, containing collections arranged with such finesse that the individual objects become a part of a larger [...]