Aspen Golann is a furniture maker, artist and educator whose work explores gender and power through the manipulation of iconic American furniture forms. Trained as seventeenth- to nineteenth-century woodworker, she mines the intersections of sexuality, identity, decorative arts and contemporary craft in a range of works including fine furniture and sculpture.
In 2020 Aspen founded The Chairmakers Toolbox—a project intending to increase access and equity in the field of chairmaking. She is published in The New York Times,Architectural Digest,Fine Woodworking, and American Craft, and exhibits internationally. She teaches at Rhode Island School of Design and holds a degree from The North Bennet Street School.
Aspen co-built In the Garden Settee with Greg Pennington at his shop in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Her bench references a style of furniture associated with nineteenth-century Connecticut maker Lambert Hitchcock, who often used interchangeable parts and stenciled gold designs on painted backgrounds. Aspen’s fresh take on this style incorporates personal elements like images of her own hands.
Rebecca Gilbert is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work exemplifies a dedication to traditional printmaking processes. Influenced by her years of experience in book arts and rare book conservation, her innovation in executing these processes in combination with cut paper and assemblage, push the boundaries of what a print can be.
Rebecca’s prints can be found in numerous public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Zuckerman Museum of Art, St. Bride Foundation, and Princeton University Library’s Graphic Arts Collection. She maintains an active exhibition record, and has extensively exhibited her work regionally, nationally, and internationally, including in galleries and museums in New York, California, Spain, Canada, Korea, Estonia, and England.
Among Rebecca’s most recent awards are a Victor Hammer Fellowship from Wells College in Aurora, New York; an Illuminate the Arts Grant to support her current project, A Dance of Death in Two Parts; a Creative Research and Innovation Grant; an Independence Foundation Fellowship; and a Winterthur Artist/Maker Fellowship.
Rebecca holds a master of fine arts degree in printmaking and book arts, has extensive experience teaching fine art at numerous institutions, is an active member of The Wood Engravers’ Network, and is represented by The Print Center in Philadelphia.
Representations of portals, longing, mystery, and communication between the realms of the living and the dead are embedded throughout much of Rebecca Gilbert’s work. She interprets these ideas in woodcut, wood engraving, etching, and letterpress as those processes allow the integration of a high level of detail and meticulously refined craftsmanship.
The pieces in this exhibition are part of a recent body of work titled Visions of Plenty: Observation, Perception, Illusion, and Reverie. Inspired by historic moveable book structures and optical devices, the work invites viewers to explore optics, perception, and the act of seeing by transforming intricately detailed prints into dimensional works on paper. The dimensional elements of the imagery and the constructions allude to different planes of existence.
I am a textile artist and independent scholar based in Central Texas. The textile traditions of the Black Diaspora are the heart of my practice. I explore the complexity of Black geographies through quilt making, botanical dyeing, archival photographs and texts.
My studio is named after my grandmothers, Barbara Jean and Geneva. I draw inspiration from my family’s legacy of being nomads and from the skills, materials and plants that they carried with them throughout their journeys.
I teach group workshops that are focused on the meditative process of creation. These workshops are suitable for both beginner and experienced makers.
From 2021–2022, I was Virtual Artist and Scholar Resident with the Black Botany Studio at University of California Santa Cruz. I was a Winterthur Maker-Creator Fellow in 2022.
Mojo for Climate Change is inspired by the design of antique seed bags from Pennsylvania. The small cloth seed bags remind me of mojo bags, protective, spiritually charged talismans that are a Black Southern spiritual practice. Mojo is medicine that is imbued with power to help the recipient. My mojo bags are an offering to the ancestors who were forced to labor in the racist and colonial economies that created the current climate catastrophe. The materials were chosen carefully to create medicine for a just, abundant world where power and resources are shared equitably. The project materials were grown and processed in ways that nourish the earth and justly compensate artisans.
This sample shows the cloth at one of the earliest stages of chintz making. The cloth underwent preparations involving scouring, myrobalan soak and boil, as well as a myrobalan and milk soak. Designs were then outlined on the cloth with a charcoal pencil. All conch 1 shapes (top five and bottom one) are outlined in a liquor made of alum and sappanwood, where red or its variations are required. All conch 2 shapes are outlined in a mixture of iron water and acid congee (fermented rice water) where a black outline is required.
Left: Conch 1; Right: Conch 2
Sample 2: First Maddering
After the outlining of the designs with the alum and iron mordants, the cloth underwent its first madder bath. It was immersed in a bath made of powdered madder root and water, and brought up to heat in the bath, with temperature maintained under 60°C, for 2 hours. This cloth shows the vivid outlines in red and black after the process of the first “maddering.”
Sample 3: First Dunging and Bleaching
This sample shows the cloth after its first dunging-plus-bleaching. The cloth will undergo four dungings and bleachings in all during the process of chintz making. In the absence of kid-dung, which was recommended by the Beaulieu manuscript for dunging, a modern version of soaking cloth in a mixture of wheat bran and chalk (calcium carbonate) mixed with warm water, was adopted. For bleaching, the cloth was dried under full spectrum sun lamps to imitate sunlight.
Sample 4: Wax as Resist
Following the first round of dunging-bleaching, rice starch was applied to the cloth. Once the starched cloth was dry, it was ready for wax as a resist, to prevent indigo from going into parts of the cloth where it was not required. This sample shows wax applied to the outlines of specific designs where blue was required within the shape, as well as to parts where inside the shape certain areas needed to remain free of the blue.
Sample 5: Vatting-Direct Indigo Application
The Beaulieu manuscript refers to both vatting as well as direct application of indigo to the cloth at this stage. This sample illustrates only direct application of indigo, to demonstrate that not only is it possible, but it also remains an effective and efficient method of indigo application. This sample shows the indigo directly applied with the aid of soy wax as resist, the cloth scraped in hot water to remove the wax, and the cloth having gone through its second dunging-bleaching following the removal of the wax.
At this stage, Beaulieu witnessed the Indian artisan applying colors in a series of steps to achieve variations of white, red, blue, green, yellow, brown, and violet on the cloth. Blue and yellow are clearly visible on the cloth at this stage, violet and brown less so, though they are yet to go through the next round of maddering to solidify the colors.
Sample 7: Second Maddering
This is what the sample looks like after the second round of concentrated maddering for four hours. The cloth has taken on a very dark red color over the background, indicating that the quantities of madder were likely too high in the bath. Equally, the overwhelming red within the designs where yellow, orange, brown, and orange were to be visible indicates issues with the measurements of the liquors used to achieve these colors on the cloth. Given the unclear measurements within the Beaulieu manuscript, it would have been a long process of empirical trial and error to arrive at the right measurements resulting in the right colors on cloth.
Sample 8: Stain Removal, Dunging, and Washing
This sample has undergone a special natural stain removal as suggested in the manuscript—scrubbing with pieces of lime. Where the scrubbing has been efficient, there the background of the cloth is clearer. Following the stain removal, the cloth was washed in a solution of soap berries. While some of the madder attached to the background has come off, the cloth remains overwhelmingly red, indicating too much madder in the second bath.
Sample 9: Final Yellow/Green
This sample has only one motif (conch 2b) covered in a mixture of cadouca-myrobalan-madder applied on blue to allow for the development of green. The motif shows negligible traces of yellow on blue, indicating another instance of trouble with measurements. This sample has also undergone the final dunging-sanding-soaping, which removed any residues of loosely attached cadouca-myrobalan-madder to the motif.
Sample 10: The Final Cloth
Following the instructions in the Beaulieu manuscript as closely as possible and making reasonable adjustments, as far as possible, without using insights available through modern techniques of natural dyeing, the final sample shows red, black, blue, brown/violet and techniques that would have illustrated white, green, yellow, and orange in the hands of a more experienced and skilled artisan.
Conclusions
The transfer of cotton printing-painting knowledge from India to Europe exhibits a case of partially useful knowledge requiring adjustments and adaptations in line with local European conditions. Certain variable elements, like deciphering the exact measurements of materials to obtain required results, would have been achievable through prolonged trial and error, as well as empirical investigations. However, certain fixed elements required by the process, like ample sunlight as part of the process of bleaching, or the use of chay root, which was unavailable in Europe, acted as fixed and largely unsurmountable constraints in Europe. Two of the earliest innovations in textile printing in Europe were aimed at overcoming these fixed constraints via the development of chemical bleaching and the isolation of alizarin for the color red.
Glossary
Myrobalan: A fruit-bearing plant that produces a buff to brown color dye or a teal color if overdyed with indigo Madder: A plant used to create a red dye Alum: A binder used to fix dyes Sappanwood: A flowering tree used to create red dye Congee: Rice porridge Mordant: Dye fixatives used to set dyes in fabric Dunging: traditional process using cow dung to fix or remove mordants
Note on the Process
Charting Chintz attempts to be as close to the chintz-making process described in the Beaulieu manuscript as possible, only using technique or product substitutions where either products were unavailable or technique not possible in its described form, or both. Key substitutions made are as follows:
Initial scouring (recipe unknown) substituted with synthrapol and soda ash
Chay root substituted with madder root
Dunging using kid dung substituted with dunging with wheat bran and chalk
Beeswax for resisting (recipe unknown) substituted with soy wax
Alka Raman is a historian with a Ph.D. from the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studies technological change in global economic history. Her research has assessed the impact of Indian cotton textiles on industrialization in the British cotton industry between 1700 and 1860. She uses historic textiles and a scientific experiments-based methodology to source quantitative evidence from textile objects. She applies this approach of scientific and empirical product analysis to understand the materiality of technological change with a view to expanding our knowledge of how technologies alter, persist or become obsolete, and why.
What did the transfer of written knowledge about chintz-making in India look like in Europe in the seventeenth century? How much knowledge did this written word contain? What would a replication of the process set out on paper look like on the cotton cloth? What would the insights of such a historical reconstruction tell us about the ways in which knowledge transferred from one region to another in the pre-modern world?
Between 1726 and 1729, an individual named Beaulieu traveled around the Coromandel Coast of South India to gain access to local techniques of chintz-making. With the help of a local artisan, he noted these techniques and obtained textile samples materially illustrating the crucial steps of the process. Beaulieu’s work is one of the most detailed accounts of pre-modern Indian techniques of painting on cloth with natural materials. It was also one of the most widely circulated accounts of Indian techniques, used liberally by European printers and dyers to inform their methods.
Charting Chintz attempts to extract the replicability of the knowledge contained within the Beaulieu manuscript. This project aimed not to make a beautiful chintz like Indian artisans, but to replicate as closely as possible the process as described in the manuscript to identify knowledge gaps that would have required bridging by European artisans in their quest to match the print quality of Indian chintzes.
This is a historical reconstruction of the chintz making process as set out in the Beaulieu manuscript, with a view to determining whether adequate technical knowledge was transferred via the written medium to make a whole chintz. In the process, it identifies fixed and variable elements that acted as obstacles to the making of a whole chintz, necessitating further empirical investigations and experiments, leading to the emergence of modern scientific techniques of textile dyeing.
Elaine K. Ng is an artist who utilizes material investigation and process-based practices to explore our relationships to place. She exhibits internationally and has lectured and held visiting positions at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Tainan National University of the Arts, and China Academy of Art. She has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Taiwan and has been in residence at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in California; Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library; and the Corning Museum of Glass. She holds a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Davis, a master in business administration/master of arts degree from Southern Methodist University in Texas, and a master of fine arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
My practice explores our physical and psychological relationships to place and the potential of our material environment to hold meaning. The work in this exhibition began with a proposal to research the cultural significance of plants in the Winterthur Garden and to use foraged dyes, pigments, and fibers to create material signatures of place. Through a serendipitous encounter with economic historian Alka Raman (also a Winterthur Fellow), a 1966 translation of 18th-century French manuscripts from the library, and an 18th-century Indian palampore on exhibit from the museum collection, my fellowship evolved into a collaborative exploration of traditional chintz techniques and the links between material knowledge, culture, and place. This work reflects a journey to seek material knowledge in its various forms, from explicit verbal explanations and visual expression in historic objects to the tacit material understanding embodied in the skilled hands of a maker.
Curtains, slipcovers, and other soft furnishings at Winterthur were often made from antique fabric. The firm of Ernest LoNano—a renowned Italian immigrant upholsterer for many museums and collectors in the mid 1900s—created the flowered silk cover for this settee from dress fabric that would never have been used for furniture in the 1700s. When Winterthur was created, finding the right look was just as important as historical “accuracy.”
Conservation graduate student (now alum) Margaret O’Neil studied stitches and measurements to recreate what the dress likely appeared before it was reimagined as upholstery.
From innovative biophilic designs to authentic native beadwork to stunning sustainable fashion, this year’s Artisan Market grant recipients embody the true essence of artistry and craftsmanship.
Mike and Alysha Borio | MB Woodworking
How did you begin your work, and what is the message behind it?
We began building custom furniture for friends and family and quickly realized it was something we wanted to try to do full-time. We also have a love for nature and thought it would be interesting to combine two natural elements—wood and plants—together to create one-of-a-kind artwork. We started creating beautiful, handmade propagation hangers, shelves, and plant stands with wooden chevron designs. We soon discovered natural, preserved moss, which changed the game for us. We started to create handmade frames from local lumber and filled them with an intricate arrangement of lush, preserved mosses and ferns! These “jungle walls” soon became our favorite thing to create. Now we create custom moss/jungle walls for homes and businesses, as well as teach DIY Moss Frame workshops! Moss absorbs sound, so it also helps with the acoustics in restaurants, venues, conference rooms, etc. Since this moss is preserved, it requires zero maintenance! It is the perfect option for people who would love to own house plants, but can’t seem to keep them alive, travel often, or don’t have enough light in their homes. We understand the importance that plants have in our lives. Research has shown that being around plants lowers stress levels and creates feelings of peace, tranquility, lessened anxiety, and improved focus. We know not everyone has the ability to get outside each day, so with these preserved jungle/moss walls, we hope to bring the peacefulness of plants indoors (without the mess or maintenance) for everyone to enjoy!
What does receiving this grant mean to you?
Receiving this grant means so much! We feel that we fit right into the beauty that Winterthur brings. We know this is going to be a wonderful opportunity to connect with like-minded people who also understand the beauty of nature and the importance of being creative. Going out on your own and starting your own business, especially these days, can be a real challenge. So, we truly can’t thank you enough for this opportunity!
How does your work connect to Winterthur?
Our work connects to Winterthur’s mission by exemplifying everything the mission stands for! We know that creativity, openness, integrity, and finding beauty in life are as important to Winterthur as they are to us. We use nature to create artwork, which we feel encompasses Winterthur in full. Taking the beauty and wildness of nature and turning it into something that can be brought inside to enjoy for years is something we feel very honored to be able to do.
How did you begin your work, and what is the message behind it?
I returned home to Nanticoke land nearly twenty years after I had left it. An enlistment in the Navy, two college degrees, and one divorce later, I returned with a longing to connect with my ancestry.
There was no glamorous beginning to this journey. I taught myself two-needle flat stitch in the kitchen of my one-bedroom apartment while my baby was asleep. With a new career and a new child to care for, I quickly learned the value of making small efforts consistently. I learned whatever stitch I could with whatever time I had. Often, I honed those skills while much of the world slept. I’ve been studying and practicing this art form for two years now, and I apply this mindset to every aspect of my life. Small efforts every day bring about great results.
One of my goals is to deliver authentic, elevated, native-beaded items that stand apart from the mass-produced and mundane. To bring visibility to indigenous art and fashion, and ultimately to bring honor and recognition to the Nanticoke Nation of Old Indian River Hundred.
What does receiving this grant mean to you?
Receiving this grant means opportunity to me! It means the chance to represent myself and my tribe and bring attention to the beauty of real native beadwork!
Through my artwork, I have a chance to show Artisan Market attendees who I am and who the Nanticokes are. To have that chance, and to do it with the help of this grant, is such a blessing.
How does your work connect to Winterthur?
My work connects with Winterthur’s aim to preserve and study American history by celebrating what remains. I am a descendant of the Nanticokes who inhabited this land before European colonization. No greater piece of American history deserves to be listened to.
How did you begin your work, and what is the message behind it?
Being an artist has truly been a lifelong journey for me. I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pencil. Sewing was a passion I picked up later on while creating Halloween costumes from scratch with my mom. As I’ve grown older, I’ve picked up many other creative passions—from linocut printing to jewelry making—there isn’t an art form I haven’t connected with! The message behind my work is centrally focused on finding the most ethical and sustainable ways to create and design for a better future. I strive to be the change I want to see in the world by using secondhand materials whenever I can, thinking intentionally about the lifespan and circularity of my creations, and sourcing locally for at least 90 percent of my materials and outsourced labor. Additionally, as a queer artist, I work to create garments and art that exist outside of the binary. I feel a strong sense of responsibility to the community to create art that helps us feel seen, valued, and loved.
What does receiving this grant mean to you?
This grant is truly a gift. Had I not received it, I would have missed out on this incredible opportunity to share my work with the world. This grant will not only aid the exposure of my vision and craft, but it will also inevitably provide me with the funds to continue making and selling art at an affordable price point, giving back to the community, and expanding my knowledge as a creative. I am infinitely grateful to Winterthur for seeing something special in my work, and offering me a spot at Artisan Market!
How does your work connect to Winterthur?
My work ties in strongly with Winterthur’s mission to inspire and educate through art, design, nature, and history. I strive to inspire others to see the value in sustainable, slow, and intentional practices through the viewing and wearing of my art. In my own small way, I hope to shift consumers’ perspectives on the worth of their garments and possessions. To preserve our beautiful natural world and continue to appreciate what it offers, we must learn to value the processes that extend the life cycle of our possessions. I clearly see these values of preservation and education alive at Winterthur, and I feel honored to be a part of it.
As Winterthur’s dedicated beekeeper for four years, George Datto is more than just a honey producer. He’s also an advocate for sustainable beekeeping practices.
The honey from the apiary is sold in the Museum Store at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Perhaps more importantly, the apiary keeps vital pollinators in the gardens and natural lands on the nearly 1,000-acre estate.
In honor of World Bee Day on May 20, we’re telling you a little about what George has been doing.
Alongside his involvement in beekeeping and educational initiatives at Winterthur, George and a friend have also been brewing a revolutionary idea since 2016: a new kind of beehive designed to alleviate the labor-intensive nature of traditional methods.
When George started at Winterthur, he was already working on a design for a new kind of beehive, so he moved five prototypes onto the Winterthur property.
Nat Wolfe and George Datto inspect beehives at Winterthur.
George began as a hobbyist beekeeper in 2008 with an apiary at his farm in southeastern Pennsylvania. He is a co-founder of Revolution Bees, which promotes sustainable beekeeping and honeybee education and is one of the top regional producers of local honey and artisanal honey products.
He also is President of the Chester County Beekeepers Association (CCBA), where he created the apprentice and citizen science programs for the 700-member organization. He also leads the queen mating program and manages the CCBA nucleus colony apiary, which helps promote and distribute high-quality local genetics.
The hive prototype came about in 2016 when George, a retired pediatrician, invited Nat Wolfe, a retired master carpenter, to come along one day as George checked his beehives. Nat was immediately struck by how labor-intensive it was to perform hive maintenance as George wrestled with boxes of bee- and honey-filled hive frames that each weighed 60 to 70 pounds.
With Langstroth hives—the global standard—the boxes need to be removed and restacked with each hive inspection. So, Nat and George put their heads together and came up with a new design. Instead of lifting entire boxes of bee-filled frames, their patented design allows beekeepers to open a roof and move frames around individually.
In the spring, beekeepers must inspect their hives every one to two weeks to prevent swarming, which is when part of a hive leaves to reproduce its current hive elsewhere.
Bees that swarm are as equally likely to find a house as they are a tree. When that happens, it will usually spell the end of that new hive in the form of a pest control expert, George explained. “The bees aren’t thinking about your honey production; they’re thinking about survival,” George said of swarming.
Bees swarm because the brood chamber becomes too crowded, Nat added. “If we lived in a small house and we had five or six kids and kept having kids, you’d eventually need a new house,” he said. “It’s the exact same principle.”
The usual swarm-control technique is to move some brood frames to the top and replace them with empty frames at the bottom. The hive grows as the season continues. “The benefit of our hive is it takes the lifting out of it,” Nat said. “You open the door, move the frames around, and close the door.”
The innovative approach not only reduces stress on the bees but also empowers beekeepers to manage their hives with ease, said entrepreneur Dave McNeeley, who is working with George and Nat to launch their company, The Keeper’s Hive. “You can do more management, more often, with more confidence,” Dave said. It’s especially desirable for beekeepers with busy schedules or older keepers who want to lift less, he added.
As they exhibited their designs to other beekeepers, they received a lot of interest. The pandemic slowed their progress as beekeeping shows were put on hold, but they’re moving forward again. There are now nine of their prototypes at Winterthur.
Over the past two winters, the survival rate of the populations in Winterthur’s hives was 100 percent. “That’s atypical, for sure,” George said. In our region, some hives might lose 30 to 50 percent of their bee populations due to poor nutrition and disease, he said.
With a call to action for interested individuals to join their journey by subscribing to emails through www.thekeepershive.com, the trio invites enthusiasts to witness the evolution of beekeeping firsthand and potentially contribute to the buzz surrounding their burgeoning enterprise by donating to their crowdfunding campaign in June 2024.
Dave McNeeley, Nat Wolfe and George Datto maintain the apiary at Winterthur.The queen bee can be seen at the end of George Datto’s thumb.
WINTERTHUR, DE (May 4, 2024) – Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library has acquired an 1857 oil painting in remarkable condition depicting an identifiable free Black member of the regional Baltimore community.
In this group portrait, Vermont-born painter Thomas Waterman Wood (1823–1903) documented an important moment in history just before the American Civil War when the Baltimore area held the largest population of free Blacks in the United States, said Dr. Kedra Kearis, associate curator of art and visual culture at Winterthur.
The work was commissioned by Quaker abolitionists James Ellicott and Harriet Jolliffe Tyson and painted during Wood’s two-year tenure in Baltimore. The narrative-style portrait portrays servant Sidney Hall tending to the Tysons’ youngest children, Patty and Lilly, who are engaged in a tea party on an outdoor brick patio. At the time of the painting, Sidney was 22 years old, and Patty and Lilly were 5 and 3, respectively.
Rachel and Ben Elwes of Ben Elwes Fine Art, London, brokered the sale. Rachel Elwes is a graduate of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in American Material Culture.
“When Rachel presented this painting to me and then shared it with Kedra Kearis, we both knew this was an ideal acquisition for Winterthur,” said Alexandra Deutsch, John L. and Marjorie P. McGraw Director of Collections at Winterthur. “The layers of history this painting represents continue to unfold as the research expands.”
“By naming Sidney Hall and working to uncover and share her story, we have a tremendous opportunity to engage with the representation of a Black sitter and staff member of the abolitionist Tyson family,” Kearis elaborated. “The picture was painted about four years before the Civil War when enslavement remained legal in Maryland. The Baltimore area had approximately 25,000 free Black community members. It was amidst this complicated backdrop that Wood painted Sidney Hall’s portrait.”
The painting, measuring 17 ½ x 13 ½ inches, is on display in the Galleries at Winterthur starting Tuesday, May 7, 2024.
Dr. Joyce Hill Stoner, paintings conservator and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg professor of material culture and director of the preservation studies doctoral program at the University of Delaware, examined the painting and remarked on its close-to-original condition.
“It is rare to see a painting of this age with so little intervention,” Stoner said.
Two members of the Tyson family previously owned the painting. Its reverse side bears a stamp identifying a Baltimore canvas supplier.
The acquisition was unanimously approved by both Winterthur’s collections committee and executive committee, said Chris Strand, Charles F. Montgomery Director and CEO of Winterthur.
“There was a feeling of jubilation in the room when the final votes came in and we knew this remarkable painting would become part of Winterthur’s collection,” Strand said.
“For those of us who advocated for this acquisition, it was an inspiring moment to see the support the trustees offered for this purchase,” Deutsch added. “I knew the history of the Tyson family and the history of Baltimore’s large free Black population before the Civil War. As I looked beyond the quality of the painting, I immediately saw the interpretive potential it offered as a document of Black history and the history of abolition.
“This acquisition attests to Winterthur’s commitment to building its collection with an eye to objects that allow us to further tell complete histories. It is a fine painting in remarkable condition. Still, it is also an important historical document of Sidney Hall, a free Black woman in the Baltimore area, and the Tyson family’s association with the abolition movement.”
The composition’s background evokes the rolling hills of Ellicott Mills, now Ellicott City, about ten miles west of Baltimore. Cofounded in the early 1770s by surveyor Andrew Ellicott and his brothers, Ellicott Mills became the site of the Tyson flour mills headed by Pennsylvania-born Quaker and abolitionist Elisha Tyson. Tyson used his wealth to support the Underground Railroad and the African colonization movement.
Martha Ellicott Tyson, grandmother to Lilly and Patty, was an advocate for women’s higher education and co-founder of Swarthmore College, as well as author of A Sketch in the Life of Benjamin Banneker; from Notes Taken in 1836 (1854). A neighbor and friend of the Ellicotts, Banneker was a free Black tobacco farmer, mathematician, and astronomer who contributed to the survey that defined the boundaries of the country’s capital.
The painting adds to Winterthur’s collection of works by Thomas Waterman Wood, Kearis said.
“Wood, through his genre paintings and narrative portraits, represents an important figure in 19th-century art, dedicated to portraying a range of individuals across the swiftly changing political landscape of the United States,” Kearis said.
Winterthur—known worldwide for its preeminent collection of American decorative arts, naturalistic garden, and research library for the study of American art and material culture— offers a variety of tours, exhibitions, programs, and activities throughout the year.
Winterthur is located on Route 52, six miles northwest of Wilmington, Delaware, and five miles south of U.S. Route 1. Winterthur is committed to accessible programming for all. For information, including special services, call 800.448.3883 or visit winterthur.org.
