Silhouettes to Selfies: Slow Art, Fast Change
Join us, June 4, 2015 at 6 p.m. for a cocktail kick-off!
Portraits: Trying to Tell Us Something
Portraits are a mainstay of any Tudor Place house tour, useful for identifying family members, workers, prominent friends, and others who animate the site’s history. In any medium, likenesses help us learn the site’s stories. But examined closely, these works can tell us far more than just “who” and “with whom.” A newly opened installation, Silhouettes to Selfies: Capturing Portraits Over Time, on view through August 2015, looks at two centuries of technology, custom, and attitudes in the way we depict ourselves. In the garden, visitors are invited to “frame” their memories photographically — and consider how our perceptions of place change when we wield cameras — by snapping selfies and portraits using one of the outdoor Photo Frames that dot the landscape for the duration of the installation.
A family home, the historic house abounds with likenesses of those who spent time here and (as with depictions of Martha and George Washington) their forebears. Of the approximately 2,200 works in the fine art collection they left to the museum, over 100 are likenesses of people who lived on, visited, or worked on the estate. Among the collection’s 4,000 photographs, 334 are portraits of the Peters, their servants, friends and kin, even pets, from a rare 1850s daguerreotype to mid 20th-century prints made with Kodak equipment. The collections’ portraits vary in material, quality and expense, from early 19th-century cut paper silhouettes of Martha and Thomas Peter’s daughters, America (“Meck”) and Columbia (“Lum”), to formal oil-on-canvas self-portraits by Armistead Peter 3rd from the mid-1900s.
On View in House and Garden
Regular guided tours during the installation will feature these as well as art and artifacts not on permanent exhibition. In the garden, three strategically placed Portrait Frames invite viewers to “frame” portraits of place and of themselves in it — an entertaining new way to interact with the landscape and the architecturally significant house designed by Dr. William Thornton. Inside the historic house, photographic equipment from the early 1900s through the era of the Polaroid will be on view in the Butler’s Pantry; that might seem an odd setting, only until you learn the space had served as a family darkroom before the house’s renovation in 1914. In the Office, visitors will see works by author and artist Marietta Minigerode Andrews, arrayed on the desk of her friend Armistead Peter, Jr. Minnigeroode, who was ambidextrous, presented him with a book about her paper-cutting art, also on view. (Her grandfather, Charles Minigerode, was a German immigrant and classics scholar who rose to a prominent Episcopal pulpit in Richmond from which he counseled Jefferson Davis, earning the nickname “Father Confessor of the Confederacy.” as recounted by Colonial Williamsburg historian Harold B. Gill, Jr.)
As part of the installation, Tudor Place joined the worldwide movement of Slow Art Day, on Saturday, April 11, inviting visitors for special focus on four key portraits from the collection in a program that paired old-fashioned observation with music, conversation, and sketching. A group lunch was included, making for an unusual (and social) experience in art appreciation. Each portrait of four carefully chosen pieces, in different media and tied to the house and its history, was studied for 15 minutes each. They included an oil painting, a watercolor, a plaster bust, and a photograph, featuring mixed generations and solo subjects, images of different eras, and even a nod to another continent.
Preserving Portraits and Plumbing Their Secrets
While portraits can be counted on to live on after their subjects, they too, are subject to the ravages of time. In collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, Tudor Place recently conducted conservation analysis on its important portrait of founder Thomas Peter. X-ray fluorescence spectometry shed light on past “improvements” and repairs that had obscured significant details of the sitter’s clothes, setting, and symbols of his status embedded in the original portrait, indicating that further conservation work might reveal more about the painting’s original design. With generous support from the MARPAT Foundation, Tudor Place also conserved seven other painted portraits this year: John Parke Custis IV, ca. 1725; William G. Williams’s Self-Portrait; Williams’s painting of his wife , America Peter Williams and Son Laurence, ca. 1833; and three paintings by Armistead Peter 3rd — a double portrait of his wife and daughter from 1932, his 1949 Self-portrait in naval uniform, and a portrait of his wife from 1925 in a green cloche hat. And the museum also took steps recently to conserve rare 1850s daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, and ivorytypes in the collection — all predecessors of print and, now, digital photography.
