What a Mess

I love this photograph.

I can't quite make out who and what are pictured in the dozens of photographs arrayed on the wall. But that's besides the point. I love it because I can't help but think about the fact that a hundred years before this late nineteenth-century photograph was taken, it just wasn't possible to surround oneself with likenesses of one's friends and families in this way.

How did photography change the nature of remembering and sentimentality? 

I also love this photograph because it reminds me how much I wish more curators of period rooms in museums took a cue from "real life" and dared to fashion more cluttered and less sterile (if not physically, than perhaps intellectually) interpretive spaces. A question about how remembering and sentimentality changed over time probably would not be inspired by a period room featuring a token photograph on the wall. Indeed, it occurs to me that most members of the general public (as opposed to a historian/museum pro like me) get their history from house museums, not collecting and studying intently photographs of historic interiors. So it's really up to the keepers of museums to embrace what a mess history was and is and how fascinating and enlightening interrogating these messes can be.

One of the most memorable "messes" I saw in a period room was last winter at Colonial Williamsburg.

For me, at least, I started to think about the history of cleanliness, pest eradication, and even sex--not just the identities of the people who lived there in the colonial era.

So what are we waiting for? Find your museum's mess and stir it up. Or if you are doing this already (or have seen it done), tell me about it in the comments!

Further Reading

I wrote a bit about cleanliness and period rooms last February as it related to workshop period rooms. Check out that post about cleaning, inventorying, cataloguing, and reinstalling a duck decoy shop here.

Kitty Calash writes often and well about accessing "truth," "authenticity," and the like in historical interpretation at living history events and inside historic house museums at her blog, Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer. Franklin Vagnone writes on some of these themes too. You can check out his stuff here.

For more examples of nineteenth-century interiors of people and their photographs, see Katherine C. Grier's Culture & Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930 (1988).

Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 14-15, The Stairs and the Bedroom

Nicole

In chapter fifteen on The Bedroom, Bryson situated “many of life’s most profound and persistent unhappinesses” inside the bedroom (320). I doubt that misery always played out in the bedroom (particularly before too many people actually had such private spaces), but in this chapter, Bryson touched upon things I’d like to discuss briefly: sleeping tight and amputation.

Let’s start with the former. Before the box spring there were bed ropes. In house museums, we talk a lot about how tightening such ropes inspired the saying “sleep tight.”

Makes sense, right?

Bryson proudly perpetuated this popular wisdom on page 321, but it turns out he is wrong. Even I believed this ol’ house museum tale until I decided to check up on Bryson’s conclusion (since we have identified a few incorrect or questionable interpretations of private life in At Home).

Where are we to turn for someone to set us straight?

Colonial Williamsburg has published several articles online in which CW interpreters corrected house museum myths about early American life such as “people were shorter” and “most people were illiterate." On sleeping tight, we learn from the master interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg that in early America, sleep tight meant sleep well and was not related to tightening bed ropes.

Yet bed ropes were, in fact, tightened, and I did not know how the ropes were tightened until this past summer when I decided it was time to look it up. I found a great demonstration on YouTube, brought to you by interpreters at Log Cabin Village in Forth Worth, Texas.

These chapters raised several historic site interpretation issues that deserve more nuanced attention. Below, Tyler comments on one more.

But first: There is no easy segue way from bed ropes to amputation. Let me begin by suggesting that many early Americans made amputations-—a seemingly private event, as Bryson framed it-—a public affair by reporting on it in newspapers or in other ways such as commemorating it in stone. As I hinted in a previous At Home post, this past summer, I spent some time researching a gravestone in one of Newport’s graveyards. The gravestone commemorates the death of one woman’s two babies as well as her 1786 arm amputation. The singular aspect of the gravestone is that it includes a realistic likeness of the amputee’s arm alongside traditional stylized “soul effigies” and the like. If you would like to learn more about the public memory and meaning behind this private incident, come to Newport and hear my talk at the Newport Historical Society’s Annual Meeting on Thursday, September 22, 2011.

Tyler

As usual, these chapters are filled with interesting tidbits about topics as diverse as the frequency of fall fatalities (some 12,000 every year in the U.S., 306), mourning attire (perhaps not as strictly regimented as Bryson suggests), cremation, and some rather gruesome sexual deterrents. But one of the things which caught my attention amidst this hodgepodge was Bryson’s discussion of wall-coverings, including both wallpaper and paint (314-319). Bryson notes the famous recent repainting of Thomas Jefferson’s dining room at Monticello from a muted Wedgewood blue to a brilliant chrome yellow, which, according to the most recent scientific studies, was its original hue. You, too, can elevate your own living space to Jeffersonian heights, without the more insidious toxic qualities of the original color, with a little help from Ralph Lauren. Something that’s easy to miss in the recent trend towards rediscovering the vibrant side of the painted past is the equally impressive range of subtle colors historic interiors featured. The “stone colours” of the eighteenth century were much more diverse, textural, and evocative than we might think. For an interesting discussion of these hues and others, check out this interview with historic paint consultant Patrick Baty.

Even his paint cards look appealing!

Further Reading

Colonial Williamsburg published a good number of its recent history magazine issues online. The research is sound and fascinating and can be useful in all sorts of interpretive situations. Click here to learn more.

The "serial newsletter" Enfilade is published in blog format by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture. The newsletter is updated often and includes calls for papers, informational interviews such as the one to which Tyler linked above, book and exhibition reviews, and more. The blog is a great resource for anyone who studies eighteenth-century cultural and social history.

Interpreting the "Period Room"

This evening, The New York Times published a blog entry about museum period rooms for Living Rooms by Joan Dejean: "Rooms Worth Keeping." Dejean speculates on why period rooms, or gallery spaces in museums (fine arts museum and house museums alike) that reconstruct a specific room at a specific moment in time, drew and continue to draw unflinching fascination among museum visitors. Dejean notes that "Museum period rooms are often...amalgams of elements of varying origins." She goes on to recount the fascinating and complex history surrounding the Fragonard Room at the Frick Collection(one of my favorites) in New York City to prove her point.

Many museum professionals and scholars of material culture, design, and other related fields, however, fear--and in some cases, have proven---a waning interest in the "period room" and/or house museum (filled with period rooms) concept. Period room interpretation needs to be refreshed.

Traditionally, the field of American material culture credits the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 1920s American period rooms as the first in a fine arts museum setting. Many other museums followed suit: the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, the Winterthur Museum, and countless others. Usually, period rooms are interpreted as snapshots in time, if you will--whether it be 1776, 1865, or 1920. Each room is arranged, designed, and decorated to a specific era.

Some house museums boast rooms caught in time. The Asa Packer Mansion Museum in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is a personal favorite complete with a calendar open to the day its last resident passed away. Some fine or decorative arts museums have relocated such time capsules to their own galleries. On the other hand, some house museums and period room galleries display rooms furnished and arranged according to a curator's or other interpreter's idea of a specific era and place. There is a spectrum of period room interpretive possibilities, and there is something to be learned from each of these installations no matter where they fall on the spectrum.

Often, though, as Dejean observes, period rooms are "amalgams of elements of varying origins." In other words, they do not reflect just one period. Look around your own living space. Does it reflect the year in which you moved into your current domain? I moved to Apartment C in June, 2010, but it is filled with objects owned by my family as well as objects owned by complete strangers. A tour of my living room might highlight my paternal grandmother's chest which was made in Milton, Pennsylvania, and purchased and used by my grandmother in New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. Now, my tv rests on top of it, and I store Christmas decorations inside. Another highlight might include my sofa. My parents bought it for me from a furniture warehouse in Pennsylvania in 2007, and I have used it in three apartments in Delaware even though I had my heart set on an over-stuffed red velvet sofa that would have been monstrously out of proportion for any of my Delaware apartments. Finally, I might also highlight a late eighteenth-century Chinese export porcelain teabowl and saucer that boasts a provenance so fascinating that it inspired me to start a blog about antiquing and material culture. These are the stories that visitors want to hear. History is not cut and dry, and interpretations of period spaces should not be, either.

I am happy to report that I have recently been involved in two museums' efforts to interpret their period rooms in all their complexity. As a cataloguer working with the Winterthur Museum's furnishing textiles (upholstery, bed hangings, and window hangings), in some instances, I helped uncover long-forgotten furnishing fabrics once displayed and used by Henry Francis du Pont at Winterthur. Some of these furnishings are so different from those currently on display in the rooms (which are no longer called "period" rooms, just "rooms") for which they were originally designed in the early twentieth century that displaying them would dramatically alter the room's current interpretation. For example, the formal dining room has been a showcase for classical decoration, but at one time, the room was outfitted with mid nineteenth-century printed cotton seat covers adorned with exotic images of the near east. In addition, as a volunteer at my local historical society, I have been involved in considering how the society may alter its interpretation plan for one house that was built circa 1700, inhabited by craftsmen throughout the eighteenth century, and furnished during the Colonial Revival under the understanding that the home dated to the 1650s. Coupled with a growing interest in the history of collectors and collecting, I have high hopes that many museums will follow suit.

Yes, period rooms--whether they are part of house museum or galleries--are "rooms worth keeping," but as we have the time and money to grapple with and interpret what is often a layered historical reality, these new interpretations will reinvigorate visitors' and scholars' interest in what period rooms are, how they became what they are, and what they mean.

Further Readings (just a sampling of so many possibilities)

The Frick Collection, the Center for the History of Collecting in America, http://www.frick.org/center/.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2004).

James Parker, et. al., Period Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996).

John A. H. Sweeney, The Treasure House of Early American Rooms (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1963).