American Decorative Arts Studies at Yale and Winterthur: The Politics of Gender, Gentility, and...

American Decorative Arts Studies at Yale and Winterthur: The Politics of Gender, Gentility,and AcademiaAuthor(s): CATHERINE L. WHALENSource: Studies in the Decorative Arts, Vol. 9, No. 1 (FALL-WINTER 2001-2002), pp. 108-144Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40662801 .

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CATHERINE L. WHALEN American Decorative Arts Studies at Yale and Winterthur: The Politics of Gender, Gentility, and Academia

The study of American decorative arts became part of Yale University's undergraduate curriculum in 1932. Twenty years later, the first master's

degree program in American decorative arts studies, the Winterthur

Program in Early American Culture, was established at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum in Winterthur, Delaware, under the aegis of the University of Delaware, Newark. The history of American decorative arts studies at Yale and Winterthur illuminates significant changes in attitudes toward pedagogy and scholarship within the field. The

development of curricula at these two institutions exemplifies the transformation of American decorative arts study outlined in extant histori-

ographies, including the trends toward professional curatorial training and material culture studies.1 An important, less examined, aspect of the evolution of the field, however, is the concurrent impact of twentieth-

century notions of gender and gentility.2 The field's early domination by white male elites may seem commonplace to those who have been

longstanding participants in it; nevertheless, the intersections of class and gender within this milieu merit closer consideration.3 The case study of programs at Yale and Winterthur offered here demonstrates that the

specific contours of gender and gentility are significant because they make visible the politicized processes of inclusion, exclusion, and valu- ation that have affected the status of the field within academia, and may influence its future direction.4

Two individuals dominate this case study: Francis Patrick Garvan (1875-1937), the founder of Yale's American decorative arts collection, and Florence Mello wes Montgomery (1914-1998), a prominent scholar of textiles.5 Just as Garvan's life history illuminates the place of gentility in the early years of American decorative arts collecting and scholarship, Montgomery's highlights the significance of gender to the field's postwar professionalization. Moreover, Montgomery's husband, Charles, was a

key figure in the development of American decorative arts scholarship at both Winterthur and Yale. An energetic, charismatic educator and museum professional, Charles Montgomery (1910-1978) first taught at Winterthur in the 1950s and 1960s, then at Yale during the 1970s.6

Catherine L. Whalen is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program at Yale

University.

108 Studies in the Decvraûve Arts/F all-Winter 2001-2002



American Decorative Arts Studies 109

FIGURE 1 Part of a display of the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Trumbull Gallery, Gallery of Fine Arts, Yale University, c. 1930. Photo Frederick Bush, courtesy Yale University Art Gallery, Archives.

Concomitantly, he helped shape the field's postwar rhetoric, which not only idealized colonial craftsmanship but also linked it to contemporary notions of "good design," thereby aligning decorative arts study with Cold War-era liberal humanism, normative masculinity, and Modern- ism.7 A juxtaposition of the Montgomerys' respective careers (her expertise in textiles, his in furniture and pewter) demonstrates how deeply rooted ideologies of gender, domesticity, and creativity - inflected by twentieth-century Modernism - affected studies of American decorative arts.8

The Early Years at Yale

The catalyst for Yale's foray into American decorative arts studies was the 1930 acquisition of the Mabel Brady Garvan collection (Fig. 1). The Yale alumnus Francis Patrick Garvan gave five thousand examples of early American antiques, or what he referred to as "American Arts and Crafts," to Yale's Gallery of Fine Arts in the name of his wife, Mabel Brady Garvan (1886-1979). Before his death in 1937, Garvan doubled his donation.9

The affluence that enabled the Garvans to become such major collectors was relatively recent in both of their families' histories. Francis



110 Studies in the Decorative Arts/F all-Winter 2001-2002

Patrick Garvan was the son of the Irish immigrants Mary (née Carroll) and Patrick Garvan of Hartford, Connecticut; his father was a paper manufacturer and tobacco farmer.10 Mabel Brady Garvan was the daugh- ter of Anthony Nicholas Brady of Albany, New York, a wealthy businessman and promoter who had also emigrated from Ireland.11

Francis Patrick Garvan achieved his professional and financial sue- cess largely through his own efforts. An 1897 graduate of Yale and an 1899 graduate of New York Law School, he first came to prominence as assistant to the New York district attorney. Most notably, he was a member of the prosecution team that won the 1907 case against Harry K. Thaw for his notorious murder of his wife's former lover, Stanford White, the celebrated architect.12 In 1910 Garvan went into private practice, and he and Mabel Brady married; together they would rear seven chil- dren. During World War I, Garvan was named chief of the United States Bureau of Investigation and manager of the New York office of the Alien

Property Custodian. After the War, President Woodrow Wilson chose him to direct the Chemical Foundation, Inc. with a mandate to disperse German patents seized during the war and thereby help to establish an

independent American chemical industry.13 After their marriage, the Garvans began collecting English antiques

to furnish their New York apartment. After discovering several forgeries, however, Garvan sold that collection and began purchasing early Amer- icana in earnest. With a preference for the rare, historic, and fine, he collected broadly - acquiring furniture, ceramics, glass, pewter, brass, iron, paintings, and prints - but his greatest enthusiasm was for silver.14 His focus is not surprising, as the first museum exhibitions of early American decorative arts frequently concentrated on these valuable

objects, largely because of their associations with taste and beauty, and their monetary worth, identifiable maker's marks, manageable size, and, often, known provenances.15

As a mature collector, Garvan took an encyclopedic approach. In

acquiring silver, for example, he strove for a comprehensive range of forms as well as a representative selection of makers.16 Ultimately, he envisioned his collection as a teaching tool and a source of inspiration, not just for Yale students but for the nation as a whole. As he wrote in a letter presenting the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection to Yale,

My love for and understanding of Yale University assures me that these gifts will be received in the same spirit, not to be selfishly hoarded in Yale's own halls, but to become a moving part in a great panorama of American arts and crafts which, under the leadership of Yale University, shall be made to pass over the years before every man, woman, and child in our country.17




At Yale, Garvan hoped to establish the "Mabel Brady Garvan Institute of American Arts and Crafts," with the support of a foundation in his wife's name. He proposed that the institute's staff of professional curators would undertake far- ranging collection-based objectives: mount travel- ing exhibitions for universities and high schools across the country; supervise loans to historic houses and museums; acquire objects with the dual aims of enlarging the collection's scope and improving its quality; restore and conserve objects; publish catalogues and books; publish and/or broadcast lectures and research articles; develop scientific tech-

niques for detecting forgeries; and authorize reproductions. Garvan died in 1937, however, and his grand plans never materialized.18

Although Garvan's vision for his collection was unusually expan- sive, many of his contemporaries shared his enthusiasm for exhibitions of

early American antiques as a means of social, cultural, and moral uplift for the nation.19 Cultural elites like Luke Vincent Lockwood (1872- 1951) of the Brooklyn Museum and especially Richard Townley Haines

Halsey (1865-1942) of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, both of whom Garvan admired for their taste, knowledge, and pioneering vision, considered these objects vital to "Americanizing" - that is, assimilating -

foreigners.20 Halsey, a collector and dealer turned curator, orchestrated the period room displays in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Ameri- can Wing, which opened in 1924- Like many white Anglo-Saxon Prot- estants of his generation, Halsey dreaded influxes of immigrants. Their

"foreign ideas," he lamented, were "utterly at variance with those held by the men who gave us the Republic" and threatened to "shake its foun- dations."21 Halsey was not alone in his fears; in 1924, the same year that the American Wing opened, the United States Congress implemented drastic immigration restrictions via the Johnson-Reed Act.22

Like Halsey, Garvan dreaded "Bolshevism" and "Socialism," which he viewed as "founded upon hate and envy or other destructive attempts at compulsory sharing."23 Unlike Halsey, however, he was a second- generation Irish Catholic and self-made man. Despite his wealth and impressive collection, he was excluded from the select group of collectors and experts, Halsey and Lockwood among them, who belonged to the all-male Walpole Society. The Walpole Society, founded in 1910 and named for eighteenth-century English collector Horace Walpole, insisted that its members have both the "requisite knowledge" of American antiques and the "broad general culture which stamps a gentleman and a scholar."24 Distinguished bloodlines were the prerequisite for that stamp.

In Garvan's case, his silver collection constituted a pedigree by proxy, grounded in the historical significance and powerful cultural




associations of these precious "white metal" objects. According to Patri- cia Kane, Curator of the Garvan Collection, Garvan paid special attention to pieces with known provenances as both safeguards against forgery and indices of historical value. In addition, he was especially wary of fraudulent silver marks.25 Handwrought silver traditionally bore hall- marks, which in English silver include not only a maker's mark but also one that indicated sterling quality - that is, 92.5 percent pure silver.26

Notably, the word "sterling" can also be used to describe character. For Garvan, such slippage between material and man may have been especially significant.

If Garvan's collection earned him the respect but not the acceptance of the Walpolians, his gift to Yale assured him of a more appreciative audience. Collecting American antiques allowed him to claim a heritage otherwise denied to him, as implied by his presentation in a 1930 portrait by Augustus Vincent Tack (Fig. 2). Tack depicted Garvan standing in front of a painting of two colonial gentry, Maxfield Parrish's Quod Erat Demonstrandum (1909),27 which is hung over a Neoclassical mantelpiece. In this picture within a picture, the pair sit across a table from one another in front of a multipaned window, drinking from pewter tankards and reading a book. Garvan is posed resting his left arm on the mantel-

piece, which features an impressive eighteenth-century covered cup made by the Boston silversmith Edward Winslow. By collecting and

displaying artifacts once used by colonists, Garvan secured a physical connection to an American past and then codified that relationship via Tack's portrait. Furthermore, through bestowing a teaching collection on a prestigious university, he helped to realize an imagined American future in which greater access to art and learning - coupled, of course, with self-improvement - might supersede individual differences. Accord-

ing to Garvan, "early or late at the vineyard gate the rich heritage of American citizenship is for all alike."28 As posthumously quoted by Charles Messer Stow of the New York Sun, Garvan "voiced his firm belief that knowledge of the arts of America's past is a necessary part of every citizen's background, especially such citizens as Yale graduates become."29 Ultimately, however, the chief beneficiaries of Garvan's gift were the predominantly elite white men who arrived at Yale each year, whom Garvan dubbed "the constant new sons of wealth" and whom he

hoped would continue to build Yale's collections.30 When Garvan gave the bulk of his collection to Yale, he also

ensured that the Gallery of Fine Arts hired John Marshall Phillips (1905-1953), the curator of his choice.31 Phillips, who had a master's

degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania, was also a collector and a dealer. Beginning in 1932, he taught one of the earliest




FIGURE 2

Augustus Vincent Tack (18704949), Portrait of Francis P. Garvan (1875-1937), c. 1930. Oil on canvas,151 x 99.7 cm. Yale

University Art Gallery, bequest of Mabel

Brady Garvan.



1 14 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Fall-Winter 2001-2002

courses in the United States to incorporate American decorative arts.

According to Phillips, this class traced "the development of American architecture, furniture, silver, glass, prints, and paintings from 1607- 1860, with special emphasis on background and their relation to Amer- ican history."32 Students attended slide lectures, viewed photographs, and studied objects in the Garvan collection. Given Phillips's stress on

connoisseurship, the course also served as an orientation for future collectors. Yale undergraduates, who dubbed the course "Pots and Pans," considered it either a "gut" or a transformational experience.33 In a tribute to Phillips after his death in 1953, one former student observed that "eighteenth-century decorum, wit and enlightenment were not

merely matters that he knew about, but attitudes which he exemplified in his own life."34 Another Yale associate paid homage to "Pots and Pans," stating that:

This course . . . touched the philistine and gave some perspective in history and tradition to those who otherwise would have been largely untouched by a Yale education, and to many others it became a permanent influence in their lives - a cultural interest which their wives could and did share with them.35

Comments like these speak to the interrelationship of gender, class, and decorative arts during this period. Implicitly, the speaker assumed that

proper wives, such as those married to Yale graduates, had a natural interest in decorative arts, presumably because of their primary identity as well-to-do homemakers. His remarks also reflect the fact that Phillips's students were male; Yale did not admit female undergraduates until 1969.36

Phillips began teaching his course just as Yale opened a spate of

Collegiate Gothic and Georgian Revival residential colleges, built to house and properly socialize a growing and increasingly geographically and socio-economically diverse student body. Designed by the architect

James Gamble Rogers, class of 1889, and funded through the largesse of Edward Harkness, class of 1897, these new buildings were conceived in the "Oxbridge" tradition exemplified by elite English colleges.37 Each residential college was to be a sheltered, self-contained community in which students could reap "the social advantages of the small Yale

College of the earlier generation amid the intellectual advantages of the

great modern university."38 Chief among those "social advantages" was the opportunity to create a web of personal relationships that promised future professional dividends. Such networks had been of great benefit to native Midwesterners like Rogers and Harkness, each of whom arrived at




Yale relatively isolated, became enmeshed in the university's social life, and formed life-long friendships as well as strategic alliances with fellow classmates. Indeed, the social value of a Yale education became the stuff of legend. As the architectural critic Aaron Betsky has observed in his discussion of Rogers's designs for Yale:

By the turn of the century, the Yale Man, fixed in the popular imagination by the Dink Stover books, became a recognizable type: an athletic, moral, not too scholarly young man who could use Yale to enter into a network of social and business relations that would ensure his success in the world beyond school.39

Phillips's course, with its emphasis on taste and tradition, ensured that the mythical "Yale Man" would maintain his polish despite an influx of non-New Englanders, public high school graduates, and scholarship students.40

From the 1930s through the 1950s, American decorative arts rarely figured prominently in Yale's curriculum outside of Phillips's course. It was during this period, however, that the university formed its American Studies Program.41 Its most oft-cited point of origin is a 1931 undergraduate course in "American Thought and Civilization," taught in tandem by the historian Ralph Henry Gabriel and the literary scholar Stanley T. Williams.42 Two years later Yale established a new Department of His- tory, the Arts and Letters, which offered undergraduate and graduate courses in the study of American civilization.43 In part, the rationale for this new mode of interdisciplinary scholarship was American exceptionalism, that is, the belief in a uniquely American character and culture forged through European colonizers' encounter with the "New World." After World War II, this curriculum evolved into the university's Amer- ican Studies Program, which was largely grounded in the disciplines of history and literature. That program soon took on an explicit Cold War agenda.

In 1949, Yale administrators and faculty revamped the American Studies prospectus with potential donors in mind. The program was to be "based on the conviction that the best safeguards against totalitarian developments in our economy are an understanding of our cultural heritage and an affirmative belief in the validity of the free enterprise system and individual liberty."44 Through positioning American Studies as a safeguard against Communism, Yale obtained substantial funding and in the early and mid-1950s further expanded the program.45 Signif- icant developments in American decorative arts studies, however, took place elsewhere.




The Winterthur Program in Early American Culture

During the early 1950s, a new institution charged ahead with the

study of early American decorative arts: the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. A notable private collection, Winterthur opened to the public in 195 1.46 The following year, the new museum and the

University of Delaware jointly established the Winterthur Program in

Early American Culture, the first master's degree program of its kind to

provide professional curatorial training in American decorative arts.47 Like the Garvan collection, Winterthur began as a private passion,

then became a public bequest. The heir to a family fortune made in

gunpowder, Henry Francis du Pont (1880-1969) started collecting American antiques in the early 1920s, which he subsequently used to furnish his ancestral home, Winterthur (Fig. 3).48 Indeed, du Pont and Garvan were collecting rivals. Correspondence between them indicates that dealers sometimes pitted one against the other in order to drive up prices on choice objects.49 Unlike Garvan, however, du Pont was a member of the Walpole Society. As the Walpolians themselves re- marked, du Pont collected high-quality objects on an unprecedented scale.50 Ultimately he amassed tens of thousands of artifacts, including many remarkable examples of furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, prints, paintings, textiles, needlework, and folk art. Moreover, du Pont selected every item with interior decoration in mind and was renowned

FIGURE 3 Northwest view of Winterthur House, after 1930. Photo courtesy The Winterthur

Library, Winterthur Archives, Winterthur, Del.




FIGURE 4 Port Royal Parlor, Winterthur, May 1935, from a stereoscopic photograph. Photo

courtesy The Winterthur Library, Winterthur Archives.

for harmoniously arranging them into beautiful settings (Fig. 4). He also

greatly enlarged Winterthur in order to display his collection. Ultimately he built and furnished 185 period rooms, complete with historic interior architecture from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth

century.51 For du Pont, the whole was indeed greater than the sum of its

parts. As Winterthur grew, du Pont envisioned it as a museum.52 When it

became one in 1951, Joseph Downs (1895-1954) was named Winter- thur's first curator.53 Downs, who formerly headed the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a fellow Walpolian and a longstanding advisor to du Pont. Charles Montgomery, previously an antiques dealer, became associate curator and executive secretary in charge of museum operations.54 He also was the primary force behind the new graduate program in the study of American decorative arts.

Montgomery garnered support for this novel idea based on two key features: such a program would represent the first American Studies curriculum to emphasize art (in any form) rather than literature or social history; and its graduates would be exceptionally well-qualified to per-




form curatorial work for American departments in art museums, historical societies, and historic house restorations. They would be trained

professionals in a field that heretofore lacked opportunities for formal education at the university level. Specifically, the program promoted the

study of early America through analyses of historic events, literature, fine arts - that is, architecture, painting, and sculpture - and decorative arts. Students took courses in history, English, and art history at the university and received instruction in connoisseurship at the museum. Notably, classes were coeducational from the outset.55

Since its inception, the Winterthur Program has prepared hundreds of graduates for museum jobs and has sent several dozen more into Ph.D.

programs.56 Winterthur graduates have swelled the ranks of a professional managerial class pioneered by the likes of Charles and Florence

Montgomery. In other words, in the realm of American decorative arts studies, the Winterthur Program held out the possibility that distin-

guished academic credentials would eventually catch up with distin-

guished bloodlines.

By contrast, Montgomery's own training was largely on the job. Raised in the Midwest, he came East to attend Harvard University and

graduated with a B.A. in art history in 1932. He then went to work for the New York Herald Tribune. At the same time he began acquiring early American pewter.57 By then, such vessels and utensils had become very popular - often among male collectors - partly due to nationalistic rhetoric that idealized both the colonial craftsmen who created them and "the common man" who used them.58 Early American pewter enthusiasts formed The Pewter Collectors' Club of America in Boston in 1934, their aim being "to learn as much as possible about the various pewter utensils of our ancestors, and about the fabricators of these articles"; the club held an exhibition of "ye best superfine white hard metal pewter" the follow-

ing year.59 As for Montgomery, his interest in pewter soon turned from amateur to professional. By the end of the decade, he left the newspaper business and became an antiques dealer,60 operating out of "At the Sign of the Tankard" in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Montgomery's preparation for a museum profession stands in marked contrast to that of his wife, Florence Mellowes Montgomery. Also a native Midwesterner, Florence Mellowes earned a B.A. in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1936. After travel and

study in Europe, she was a library secretary at The Art Institute of

Chicago during the 1940s. She earned a M.F.A. from Radcliffe in 1943 and completed the Fogg Art Museum course at Harvard.61 Training at the Fogg Museum emphasized the sharpening of connoisseurship skills

through the direct study and evaluation of works of art during visits to




FIGURE 5 Florence M. Montgomery, photo of 1946- 1949. Photo courtesy American Arts

Office, Yale University Art Gallery.

museums, private collections, dealers, and auction houses, as well as technical instruction in painting techniques.62 Subsequently Mellowes worked as an assistant first to the director of the Rhode Island School of Design, then to Joseph Downs at the American Wing of The Metropol- itan Museum of Art- After her marriage to Charles Montgomery in 1946, however, she left her job with Downs and started a family-63 Presumably she also supported her husband's personal and professional interest in

early American pewter, as suggested by a photograph of her setting a table during the late 1940s with what appear to be primarily antique examples (Fig. 5).

The Montgomerys came to Winterthur around 1950 when Downs asked both of them to assist him with cataloguing du Pont's collection. Whereas Charles Montgomery soon became associate curator and executive secretary, Florence Montgomery trained museum guides. Both Montgomerys also taught in the Winterthur Program. After Downs's death in 1954, Charles Montgomery became director of Winterthur and soon thereafter a member of the Walpole Society. In 1959, Florence Montgomery became keeper of textiles, a curatorial




position with no administrative responsibilities.64 She also published her first foray into decorative arts scholarship, an article on a late

eighteenth-century glass sugar bowl attributed to John Frederick Ame-

lung.65 The following year, she began publishing what would become a

steady stream of articles on early American textiles, including both handmade and factory-produced American goods as well as English imports (see Appendix). Given that Charles Montgomery had carved out his career in the male-dominated arenas of furniture and pewter and of museum administration, Florence Montgomery's decision to work with textiles may have been pragmatic, based on the options available to her as much as an attraction to the materials themselves. Unlike other

specialists in American decorative arts, the majority of textile scholars (then and now) were women. Because relatively few male scholars undertook such studies - whether because of underap- preciated collections or perceived gender- inappropriateness - women like Florence Montgomery had wide opportunity to contribute to the field.66

Ultimately, Florence Montgomery would advocate the study and conservation of textiles used in early America as important in their own

right, rather than as subordinate to furniture or room decoration.67 At

mid-century, however, if these textiles by themselves did not carry the same prestige as furniture or metalwork, they were nonetheless an im-

portant component of museum period rooms. Indeed, Montgomery's interest in textiles may have been piqued when she worked with Joseph Downs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recounting Downs's attention to furnishing fabrics at the American Wing during the 1930s and 1940s, she commented on his use of print sources for period room installations. Noting that Downs "began his career under Fiske Kimball," the restoration architect and director of what became the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she lauded Marie G. Kimball, his wife, as a "singularly successful" early researcher and interpreter of furnishing fabrics and

presumably Downs's instructor on the topic.68 Furnishing fabrics played an especially important role in Winter-

thur's aesthetic, in contrast to the Garvan collection, where they were

largely absent. Du Pont reveled in textiles, not so much for their own

sake, but as drapery and upholstery.69 He even went so far as to sacrifice

eighteenth-century silk ball gowns for chair slip seats, not an uncommon

practice in museums as well as private collections during the 1930s and 1940s.70 Beautiful textiles were integral to the elegance of Winterthur's

period rooms, which attracted many visitors, especially homemakers who

yearned to recreate the early American interiors illustrated in fashion- able decorating books and periodicals.71




Indeed, when Winterthur opened to the public in 1951, it did so in concert with the increasing popularity and postwar expansion of Amer- ican history museums.72 Like many other institutions during the Cold War, Winterthur used early American artifacts to forge consensus his-

tory, that is, a history of the United States based on a purportedly "common climate of American opinion" anchored to "the defense of freedom."73 This interpretive framework stood in striking contrast to earlier Progressive-era histories that focused on class conflict.74 As an

example, in 1948 the consensus historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that

"staple tenets of the central faith in American political ideologies" have been "the sanctity of private property, the right of the individual to

dispose of and invest it, the value of opportunity, and the natural evolution of self-interest and self-assertion, within broad legal limits, into a beneficent social order."75 By 1953, Hofstadter's fellow historian Daniel Boorstin contended that "American philosophy" needed no explicit agreement because it was already "implicit in the American Way of Life."76

In a similar spirit of American exceptionalism, twenty-two museum curators and academics met at Winterthur in 1954 to discuss "The Place of Objects and Ideas in Early American History." Their goal was to come

up with a series of nine articles called "America's Arts and Skills," first

published in Life magazine in 1955 and 1956, then issued as a book the

following year. This series, subtitled "The Traditions That Shaped U.S. Taste," reached an audience of an estimated twenty-five million readers.77 The cover of the inaugural issue featured a "Frigate's Figure- head," a skillfully carved wooden bald eagle looming large amid a display of nautical artifacts at The Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia (Fig. 6).78 Lit from above and dramatically photographed from a vantage point directly underneath, this icon encapsulated the predominant theme of the series: the national ethos as evidenced by craftsmanship in

conjunction with technological (and commercial) prowess. The historian Thomas Schlereth has characterized postwar scholars who undertook efforts similar to the Life series as "metahistorians" attempting "to synthesize all historical evidence, including documentary, oral and material" in support of broad generalizations about an American national character.79 They frequently emphasized "how the pragmatic, vernacular, and progressive forces of democracy have shaped and been

shaped by American things" and they focused on "technology as the artifactual data most revelatory of the nation's ideology."80 The Life series "America's Arts and Skills" was largely a manifestation of this genre of

scholarship.81



122 Studies in the Decorative Arts/Fall-Winter 2001-2002

FIGURE 6

Life magazine cover, "Part I of a Major 'Life' Series, America's Arts and Skills: The Traditions That Shaped U.S. Taste"

(April 18, 1955), featuring "Frigate's Figurehead," The Mariners Museum,

Newport News, Va. Photo Eliot Elisofon/ TimePix.

In a promotion for the Life series, the publisher Andrew Heiskell wrote that its goal was to "trace the growth of our culture" and "record in words and pictures the progress of this nation's unique artistic tradition of 'beauty with usefulness/ "82 Chapter by chapter, the series would "examine an important period of American history in terms of the art and design which it produced," so that the reader might realize "how well three centuries of American artisans have combined esthetic taste with manual skill-"83 Chief among the artifacts Heiskell invoked were "the

Cape Cod house, that distinctively American piece of architecture," and "the Franklin stove, that most ingenious work of an archetypal Ameri- can."84 As the Life series ultimately demonstrated, the legacy of that




"archetypal American," Benjamin Franklin, found its present-day apo- theosis in the predominantly white male professional managerial class within fields of applied science.

"America's Arts and Skills" began with Charles Montgomery's introduction, followed by "Part I: The Practical World of the Colonists."85 Here the "tinkering Yankee" made do with the materials at hand and

produced objects that were both useful and beautiful, such as "the first functional homes," fashioned from "rough wood sheathing" and "covered with overlapped clapboards."86 According to the Life series,

From all this emerged a house of clean lines and compact look, the decoration either omitted or simplified. Considering the materials available - much wood, little glass and hand labor - the New En- gland home was for its time a magnificent example of functional architecture - in every sense of this word so often applied to modern building.87

By inference, just as American Modernists espoused "form follows function," so too "our colonial forebears" preferred simple elegance to lavish European ornament.88

Likewise, the magazine's descriptions of who made what over time implied that past and present American society, while diverse, was harmonious and orderly. In consonance with mainstream thought of the

day, the Life series emphasized a class of artisans (as opposed to slaves, servants, or gentry) and acknowledged regional differences, but largely elided racial distinctions and reaffirmed traditional gender roles.89 Re- garding the latter, the authors cited a period text that proclaimed: "Men are generally of all trades, and women the like within their spheres."90 According to the Life series, men regularly constructed buildings, crafted furniture, forged iron, and participated in commerce.91 Women typically maintained households, where they cooked food and made cloth, as highlighted in "Part III: The Sturdy Age of Homespun."92 Although the incidence of home spinning was greatest just before the American Revolution because of nonimportation acts, relatively few women in early America actually wove all of their own cloth.93 Making cloth was time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it was typical that specially trained people, often men, wove for an entire community.94 In the context of the mid-1950s, however, the Life series's invocation of sepa- rate spheres is hardly surprising, nor is its pictorial counterpart: an image of a spinning wheel beside a hearth, a vision of colonial domesticity popular in the United States since the nation's founding95 (Fig. 7). Both resonated with the sexual division of labor that often occurred in deco-




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rative arts study at the time, exemplified by Charles and Florence

Montgomery's respective areas of gender-normative, media-based expertise.

After the panorama of "America's Arts and Skills" had progressed through three centuries, delineating a progression of styles and highlight- ing technological achievements, it ended with "Part IX: Beauty in the Tools of Today-" Here the series allied the relics of a bygone agrarian lifestyle and its ethos of craftsmanship with modern design and technol-

ogy, a trajectory made explicit by the inset of antique farm implements and hand woodworking tools positioned above the image of a Texas oil

refinery (Fig. 8).96 By tracing an arc from hard-working farmers and

ingenious colonial craftsmen to present-day technicians and engineers, "America's Arts and Skills" proclaimed that historic handicrafts, con-

temporary "good design," and technological progress were all logical manifestations of the American character and the American way of life.

During the 1950s, the ascendancy of scientific endeavor, including the growth of social sciences, affected American decorative arts study in still other ways. At Winterthur, one important influence came through the work of the University of Delaware anthropologist Frank H. Sommer and the historian Anthony N. B. Garvan (1917-1992).97 Garvan was the son of Francis Patrick and Mabel Brady Garvan, and had earned his Ph.D. in history from Yale. Beginning in 1950, he taught in the Amer- ican Civilization program at the University of Pennsylvania for several decades, serving as department chair from 1960 to 1969; he also lectured at Winterthur during the 1950s.98 In 1953, with Charles Montgomery's support, Garvan and Sommer began work on the Index of American Cultures. Located at both Winterthur and the University of Pennsylva- nia, it reflected one of the first efforts to apply anthropological methods to the study of American decorative arts. Garvan and Sommer modeled their project after Yale's Human Area Relations files, which contained information on two hundred cultures worldwide. Whereas the Yale

anthropologists compiled their files for the purpose of making cross- cultural comparisons, the Index of American Cultures contained data gleaned from objects and texts in order to study historical change. Garvan and Sommer limited each study to a fifty-year period and a single urban area. Beginning with Boston in 1675-1725, they analyzed artifacts, such as colonial silver and gravestones, and a wide range of written documents: diaries, sermons, laws, newspapers, court records, inventories, wills, scientific writings, and institutional and government records. Each item received codes in accordance with a set of pre-established catego- ries. (For instance, as assessed in the Index of American Cultures, a 1702 Edward Winslow silver sugar box replete with elaborate chased and




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repoussé decoration conveyed evidence of the following: accultura-

tion, mnemonic devices, writing, condiments, smiths, weapons, hard-

ware, utensils, property, gift giving, decorative arts, status, ordering of

time, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and ethnoanatomy.) According to

Garvan, the files would provide historians with information "on a wide

range of cultural activities quickly and easily," ranging from "religious theory, economic practice or family life" to "technology, city planning and mathematics."99 Clearly Garvan shared his family's passion for American antiques in the broadest possible sense, but he did so as an

analytically-minded professional historian rather than as a beneficent collector.

Charles Montgomery, forced by heart disease to give up his position as Winterthur's director in the late 1950s, increasingly turned to teach-

ing, research, and writing,100 incorporating the new scientific rigor into the study of early American decorative arts. His influential article published in The Walpole Society Note Book in 1962, "Some Remarks on the Practice and Science of Connoisseurship,"101 laid out a fourteen-step process for evaluating an object, including scientific analysis of materials via the use of microscopes, X-rays, ultraviolet light, and other laboratory techniques.102 In addition to connoisseurship, collection-building was another of Montgomery's passions. As a teacher, he emphasized not only object-based knowledge but also the social skills that curators needed to extract gifts from collectors.103 In other words, he consciously reconfig- ured the gentility of an earlier era into cultural capital of considerable value to the museum professional.104 Perhaps the crowning achievement of this phase of Montgomery's career was the 1966 publication of his masterwork, American Furniture: The Federal Period, in the Henry Francis

du Pont Winterthur Museum.105 More than a catalogue of Winterthur's collection, this ground-breaking book covered previously unexamined

aspects of the business of cabinetmaking, and included a wealth of attribution techniques and references.106 It also contained a valuable

chapter called "Upholstery and Furnishing Fabrics" written by Florence

Montgomery.107 Likewise during the mid-sixties, Winterthur founded a scholarly

journal of American decorative arts: Winterthur Portfolio, first issued in 1964- As its editor Lisa Lock observed in Winterthur Portfolio's thirty-fifth anniversary issue, "the composition of its first editorial committee" -

Edgar P. Richardson, director of Winterthur; Milo M. Naeve, registrar; and John D. Morse, head of publications - "reflected the object-driven nature of its purpose."108 Naeve's "Statement of Editorial Policy" described that purpose:




Contributors may explore the material of which an object is made, the manner in which an object was created, distributed, and used, as well as approaches to research and preservation . . . We are interested in exploring those ideas which reflect upon taste and manners as they developed within the present limits of the United States, and their relationship to society abroad.109

Naeve's statement forecasts nascent "material culture" studies and pos- sibly evokes older class-based concerns. Perhaps the editors regarded objects as a means of preserving "taste and manners" as well as studying them. Nuances of editorial intent aside, however, Winterthur

Portfolio served an important institutional function as a publishing ve- hicle for the museum's staff, the University of Delaware faculty, and students in the Winterthur Program.110 At the same time, the journal helped establish Winterthur as a major locus of American decorative arts

scholarship.

The Later Years at Yale

By the early 1960s, one of Winterthur's recent graduates, Jules David Prown, was championing the study of American art at Yale. Prown, who had completed the Winterthur Program in 1956, earned a Ph.D. in art

history from Harvard in 1961 after completing a dissertation on the

eighteenth-century American painter John Singleton Copley. That same

year, he began teaching in Yale's History of Art department. He then became curator of the Garvan collection and related collections of American art in 1963.111 Prown's curatorial work was hardly confined to Yale, however. He also put together a Copley retrospective that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1965, followed the next year by a comprehensive two-volume monograph that master-

fully synthesized research into primary sources and detailed interpretations of historical contexts with exacting connoisseurship and formal

analysis. In short, Prown's work established a new standard for scholar-

ship in the history of American art;112 it also constituted a methodological foundation on which he later built analyses of decorative arts.

When Prown accepted the directorship of the new Yale Center for British Art in 1968, Yale hired his mentor, Charles Montgomery, to

replace him as both professor and curator.113 During Montgomery's tenure, the study of American decorative arts at the doctoral level flourished as graduate students in both the History of Art and the American Studies Ph.D. programs pursued topics of study in the field.114 In addition, Montgomery, along with the curator of American paintings Theodore Stebbins Jr. and the curatorial staff of the Yale University Art




Gallery's American Arts office, planned the 1973 reinstallation of the Garvan collection, funded by Mabel Brady Garvan. Montgomery and his staff, in collaboration with Paul Dietrich of Cambridge 7 architects and the graphics designer Ivan Chermayeff, thoroughly reconceptualized the

display of decorative arts. They radically redesigned the gallery environ- ment in a way that broke with the period room concept epitomized by Winterthur (Fig. 9). The new installation, which allowed for the exhibition of many more objects, incorporated art museum display conven- tions that highlighted individual items and accentuated their aesthetic

qualities. The objects were organized in accordance with such central Modernist precepts as form and medium. Reflecting back on the installation later, Montgomery professed, "Decorative arts were now seen as art. The chairs were hung on the walls. We divorced them from the idea of utility and tried to see them as sculpture. We tried to see them as

technology. We tried to see them as the creation of men's hands and minds."115 The new installation, titled "American Arts and the Ameri- can Experience," also included extensive labels, time lines, and multimedia presentations that provided detailed historical contexts for the

objects, dating from 1650 to the present.116 According to Montgomery, the introductory area of "American Arts and the American Experience" intentionally "called attention to the craftsmen, to how things were

FIGURE 9 The William and Mary area of "American Arts and the American Experience: The Mabel Brady Garvan Galleries," Yale

University Art Gallery, 1979. Photo Norman McGrath, courtesy American Arts

Office, Yale University Art Gallery.




FIGURE 10 Charles F. Montgomery and introductory wall display, "Artist and Artisan - Skills, Methods, and Materials: An Introduction to American Arts," in "American Arts and the American Experience: The Mabel

Brady Garvan Galleries," Yale University Art Gallery, 1973. Photo courtesy American Arts Office, Yale University Art

Gallery.

made, to the tools that were used, and that presented an idea of how

objects changed over time and how they interrelated within their own times" (Fig. 10).117

Like the Life magazine series "America's Arts and Skills," "American Arts and the American Experience" provided extensive commentary about the objects it presented, yet it assumed a continuity between past and present premised on the timeless beauty and ingenuity of American

design. Didactic materials juxtaposed traditional craft techniques with modern factory production methods and vignettes dramatically com-

pared the results; for example, a Queen Anne side chair alongside a

beanbag one. "It does not matter whether something is old or new, hand-made or machine -tooled," Montgomery declared; instead, "What is

important is the creativity and excellence of design."118 Moreover, within clearly demarcated style periods, the installation delineated re-




gional differences by contrasting, for example, Chippendale chairs from Boston, Connecticut, and Philadelphia as well as urban versus rural artifacts. This careful attention to historical context in terms of stylistic change and geographic specificity - and above all, to "good design" -

placed high-style and vernacular objects on an equal footing but, in

hindsight, tended to overshadow the more politically charged distinctions that preoccupied subsequent scholars, namely those regarding the race, class, or gender of makers and users-119 At heart, the exhibition

emphasized the genius of American producers, whether they were seventeenth-century joiners or present-day industrial designers.

For the most part, "American Arts and the American Experience" exalted colonial craftsmen and their modern-day counterparts. Tradi- tional women's crafts such as quilts or needlework had never formed a significant part of the Garvan collection, and they received little attention in the new installation. The Twentieth Century section did feature furniture credited to the "Dynamic Duo" of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband-and-wife design team. Yet in the publication ac- companying the exhibition, the former received most of the praise: "Charles Eames is as well known (by his work if not his name) as Thomas Chippendale or Duncan Phyfe. Chippendale and Phyfe are each associated with a style - Eames with a phenomenon"; and, "Charles Eames is much more than a furniture designer; he is an architect, an in- ventor, an exhibit designer, a toy designer and a film maker. In all of these fields, he is a creative mind and an ingenious spirit."120 In contrast, substantive evaluations of Ray Eames's work came only many years later.121

Behind the scenes of "American Arts and the American Experi- ence," women staff members such as the assistant curator Patricia Kane and the curatorial assistant Margaretta Lovell (both graduates of the Winterthur Program) played key roles in its implementation.122 Florence Montgomery, on the other hand, who did not hold an official position at Yale, polished all of the silver that went on display in the new installation.123 On her husband's acceptance of his dual appointment as art history professor and curator of the Garvan collection, she had resigned from her post as Winterthur's curator of textiles in order to accompany him to New Haven. Shortly thereafter she completed her first book, Printed Textiles: English and American Cottons and Linens, 1700-1850, published in 1970.124 Throughout the 1970s, Florence Montgomery continued to publish articles on eighteenth-century American and En- glish furnishing fabrics, building on her research at Winterthur, as well as mining Yale's available resources (Fig. 11). She also assisted with reup- holstering projects for the Garvan collection, and became a textile




consultant at the American Wing, where she had worked thirty years before-125 In a tribute to the Montgomerys published in 1978 (the year of Charles Montgomery's death), Wendell Garre tt, editor of the Magazine Antiques and a Winterthur graduate, sketched out her role in what may be described as an asymmetrical intellectual partnership:

Florence has somehow managed - by her discipline, stability, sound reasoning, high standards, genuine thoughtfulness, and admirable bluntness - not only to publish her own Printed Textiles: English and American Cotton and Linens, 1 700 A 850 , a work of immense learning, but also to free her husband from the distracting cares of home so that he has been able to devote nearly all of his time to scholarly work and teaching. Sharing their interests though developing their own specialties in the American Arts, their marriage has been imaginative and resourceful, a model to their friends.126

After her husband's death, Florence Montgomery continued her career.

During the 1980s she taught survey courses on American decorative arts in the art history department of Southern Connecticut State University, where several other wives of Yale faculty taught as well.127 She also worked as a research associate for the American Arts Office of the Yale

University Art Gallery.128 In 1984, she published her masterwork, Tex- tiles in America, 1 650- 1870. Based on a wealth of primary sources, this volume encompassed a history of furnishing fabrics, a detailed dictionary

FIGURE 11 Florence M. Montgomery at the Winterthur Library, c. 1970. Photo

courtesy The Winterthur Library, Winterthur Archives.




of textile terms, and an extensive bibliography; more than a decade and a half later, it remains a standard reference in the field.129

Material Culture Studies at Winterthur and Yale

In retrospect, those aspects of "American Arts and the American

Experience" that emphasized the methods and contexts of artifacts'

production can be seen as part of the growing interest in "material culture" studies then underway in the field of American decorative arts.

By this time, the concept of "material culture," first used by nineteenth-

century anthropologists, was gaining currency with cultural geographers, historical archaeologists, folklorists, and social and cultural historians.130

Along with the "new social history" of the 1960s and 1970s, material culture studies took part in what came to be known as "history from the bottom up."131 Especially important were publications by the French Annales school, most notably Fernand Braudel's Capitalism and Material

Life, 1400-1800 (English trans., 1975). 132 In their attempt to write "total

history" - that is, "to recreate holistic views of the mentalité of a past society" - these scholars paid careful attention to material culture as historical evidence for the evolution of capitalism in France.133 For a

growing number of American scholars, analyses of material culture, in tandem with quantifiable data gleaned from public records, became a

significant means of recovering the histories of those who were not elites, and who had left behind few, if any, private documents.

What was the cultural significance of this shift toward material culture studies in American decorative arts scholarship? The change in

vocabulary itself is important; in academia in the 1970s, the rubric "material culture," weighted with the gravitas of its lineage in social sciences, implied that the objects of the study were more serious than did the phrase "decorative arts." For emerging scholars aspiring to careers in

higher education rather than museums, the broader sweep of material culture studies allowed a crucial foothold in academia. In addition, material culture perspectives, which emphasized objects in relation to human behavior, or so-called "everyday life," helped mitigate perceptions of the field's elitism, fueled by its genteel origins. The relationship of the field to gender, however, remained an uneasy one. Given the longstanding association of American decorative arts with domesticity and femi-

ninity, recurrent anxieties about its appropriateness as a field of study continued to define the boundaries of its scholarship, even as it became subsumed within material culture studies. At the same time, however, feminist scholars began to have an impact on the field, especially through studies of domesticity.134




At Winterthur and Yale, key events during the mid-1970s marked each program's decisive shift toward material culture studies. In 1975, in

anticipation of the U.S. Bicentennial, Winterthur held a conference titled "Material Culture and the Study of American Life" and subse-

quently published the proceedings.135 In response to the question "how has our study of artifacts altered our perception of American history?" the

participants - among them "archaeologists, cultural and social historians, curators and historic preservationists" - presented a variety of "case studies of makers, builders, users and buyers."136 Around the same time, Yale hosted the first National Humanities Institute (NHI) in American Stud-

ies, a three-year interdisciplinary forum sponsored by the National En- dowment for the Humanities.137 Among the participants was the folk- lorist Henry Glassie, the author of the just-published Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts,138 In this highly influential book, Glassie not only presented an exacting study of eighteenth-century vernacular dwellings that drew extensively on structur- alist theory, but he also propounded the merits of object-centered his-

tory, especially in periods or places with low literacy rates. For Jules Prown, then the associate director of the NHI program as well as

professor of art history at Yale, meeting Glassie was inspirational.139 Soon thereafter Prown began to formulate analyses of high-style decorative arts from a material culture perspective. He wrote two highly influential

articles, "Style as Evidence" (1980) and "Mind in Matter: An Introduc- tion to Material Culture Theory and Method" (1982), both of which were published in Winterthur Portfolio (subtitled from 1979 on "A Journal of American Material Culture").140 In the latter essay, Prown defined the field of material culture as "the study through artifacts of the beliefs -

values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions - of a particular community or

society at a given time."141 Drawing on art-historical methods, he also outlined a rigorous procedure for object analysis.142 Like Glassie, Prown

proposed that "objects are more broadly representative of social life than are written documents."143

Although Prown's colleague Charles Montgomery was a relative newcomer to the phrase "material culture," he was already familiar with

many of its practices, as evidenced by "American Arts and the American

Experience." Just prior to his death in 1978, Montgomery helped establish the Center for the Study of American Art and Material Culture at

Yale, with the purpose of promoting interaction between graduate students and the Yale University Art Gallery's American Arts office

through exhibitions they would conceive and implement together. The Center continues to fulfill this function, and to facilitate university-wide




networking among faculty, curators, and students interested in the study of American art and material culture.144

Perhaps the most telling indicators of the impact of material culture studies at Winterthur and Yale have been the theses and dissertation

topics pursued by each program's graduate students. By the early 1980s, Americanist Ph.D. candidates at Yale were writing dissertations on topics ranging from African- American quilts to the history of wallpaper in America.145 At Winterthur, students produced master's theses on sub-

jects such as the material culture of women's everyday lives in colonial America, the meanings of taste, and collecting ideology.146 As a number of these projects suggest, for the generation of American decorative arts scholars who first encountered "material culture studies" in the 1970s, gender and gentility were no longer mere modes of being but had themselves become objects of study.

Conclusion

Interpreting the history of American decorative arts study at Yale and Winterthur through the prisms of gender and gentility highlights certain aspects of evolving goals and practices within the field. Drawing on extant historiographies, these particulars might be interpreted as follows.147 At the turn of the twentieth century, American antiques attracted a growing number of collectors, but relatively few museum curators or academics. During the next few decades, however, interest in

early American decorative arts burgeoned. Early collectors of American

antiques included genteel men and women, but wealthy men like Garvan and du Pont, later dubbed "megaton" collectors, dominated the scene.148 The number of private and public collections increased while amateur and professional scholarship grew. Scholars tailored their research to collectors' needs. Whether collectors or curators, men who feared

charges of effeminacy because they took pleasure in fine domestic accou- terments could take refuge in exclusive male homosocial groups like the

Walpole Society, invoke the country's founding patriarchs, and emphasize public "uplift" - or, alternately, Americanization. Garvan, for one, also collected emblems of normative masculinity such as sporting prints of male athletes.149

The introduction of courses in American decorative arts at universities such as Yale in the 1930s bestowed the imprimatur of establishment academia on the field, and, with the founding of the Winterthur Program in 1952, contributed to its professionalism. Yet the nexus among schol-

arship, collecting, and class remained close, particularly at first. At Yale, for example, John Marshall Phillips's course ("Pots and Pans") cultivated




future collectors steeped in the good taste of their idealized predecessor, the elite "gentleman and scholar."

The Cold War fostered yet another role for American decorative arts. A new generation of museum professionals emerged, which included both women and men, but with men predominating. Professional couples like Charles and Florence Montgomery formed asymmetrical intellectual partnerships. Their respective areas of media-based expertise, established

by the 1950s, fell comfortably along gendered lines, as did their respective positions within the institution(s) that employed them. In concert with postwar consensus historians, American decorative arts scholars invoked American exceptionalism as they conflated past and present American ingenuity and taste, linked independent colonial craftsmen to modern organization men, and associated decorative arts with male artisan producers rather than elite patrons. At the same time, traditional men's crafts such as carpentry and metalsmithing - hyper-masculinized within the context of Cold War retellings of American history and a

booming do-it-yourself movement - became associated with modern design and manufacturing.150 Concurrently, exaggerated notions of women's home-based textile production reinforced the belief that a woman's

place was in the home (whether a colonial or Colonial Revival one) as

ever-popular reproductions of early American furnishings allowed middle-class consumers, typically figured as female, to mimic this decor in their own homes151 (Fig. 12). Such images suggest how American decorative arts have been indelibly marked by the modern construction of consumer-oriented bourgeois femininity.

During the 1970s, the contextually oriented framework of material culture studies, authorized by its social science origins, offered an anti- dote to dénigrât ions of decorative arts studies as effete, elitist, and

insignificant. Issues like gentility and gender in themselves became foci of scholarship. Topics of investigation ranged from the significance of taste and its relation to class consciousness in early America to women's associations with material culture at given historical moments in the United States.152 Studies in the latter category have focused on, for instance, the interrelationship of women, household furnishings, and

domesticity once codified in Anglo-American inheritance patterns (in which women received movable assets like furniture rather than immov- able assets like real estate).153 Others have examined how, from the latter half of the nineteenth century onward, department store managers, advertisers, home economists, and the like repeatedly targeted women as

quintessential consumers of domestic goods and so consolidated an

enduring trope: that is, the purportedly innate feminine desire for material things.154




FIGURE 12

Colonial-style kitchen featured in Better Homes & Gardens Decorating Book (Des Moines, Iowa, 1956), 341. Photo copyright Meredith Corporation.

In sum, although collecting still drives much American decorative arts scholarship, most important from an academic standpoint has been a shift away from media-based, potentially gendered expertise toward more complex, multilayered interpretations of artifacts. During the last

quarter of a century, scholars in the field have grappled with substantive theoretical and methodological issues, and undertaken thematic histories of domesticity, consumption, taste, and collecting, as well as national, racial, ethnic, class, and gender formation. In part, material culture studies, and the larger intellectual currents they have engaged, have




catalyzed that transformation. As for practitioners in the field themselves, they largely remain members of the professional managerial class.

Increasingly, they are also women, especially within the lower echelons of the museum and the academy. In the Winterthur program specifically, women have predominated in number in the classes admitted since the late 1970s.155 At Yale, smaller cohorts of American decorative arts scholars in the History of Art and American Studies Ph.D. programs preclude a clear-cut comparison, but casual observation suggests a similar trend has been underway. At each institution, women occupy top museum positions, but not academic ones.156 It remains to be seen how the

politics of gender, besides those of gentility, will continue to operate in the study of American decorative arts at these realms of higher education.

Appendix: Articles by Florence M Montgomery The following list of articles by Florence M. Montgomery is compiled from

"Florence M. Montgomery, Publications," in Barbara M. Ward and Gerald W. R. Ward, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M. Montgomery: A Tribute (New Haven, 1978), 61-65; and the bibliography of Florence M. Montgomery's Textiles in America, 16504870 (New York, 1984), 402.

"The Training of Guides for Historic House Interpretation," New York History 37, no. 2 (April 1958): 15M64; "An Amelung Sugar Bowl," Journal of Glass Studies 1 (1959): 89-93; "Copperplate Handkerchiefs," Winterthur Newslet- ter 6, no. 1 (January 28, 1960): 3; "English Chintz and the Victoria and Albert," Burlington Magazine 102, no. 688 (July 1960): 338-39; "English Textile Swatches of the Mid-Eighteenth Century," Burlington Magazine 102, no. 687 (June 1960): 240-43; "Textiles," in Accessions, I960, by the Winterthur Corporation (Winter- thur, Del., 1960), 27-32; "A Pattern-Woven 'Flamestitch' Fabric," Magasine Antiques 80, no. 5 (November 1961): 453-55; "Textiles and Textile Commerce," Winterthur Newsletter 8, no. 7 (September 30, 1962): 5; "Curtain of Documented Material Hung," Winterthur Newsletter 10, no. 8 (October 15, 1964): 1; "The Shipley Room Curtains," Winterthur Newsletter 11, no. 3 (March 15, 1965): 3; "Walters and Bedwell," Winterthur Newsletter 11, no. 8 (October 5, 1965): 1-2; "Upholstery and Furnishing Fabrics," in Charles F. Montgomery, American Fur- niture: The Federal Period, in the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (New York, 1966), 41-47; "Window Curtains in Early America," in Catalogue of the Delaware Antiques Show . . . December 1, 2, 3, 1966 (Wilmington, 1966); "Co- lonial Upholsterers and Their Wares," in Catalogue of the Milwaukee Antiques Show (Milwaukee, 1967); "Handkerchief Portrays Glorious Return of Lafayette in 1824," Winterthur Newsletter 13, no. 7 (September 1967): 1-2; "English and American Printed Textiles," in Summaries of Lectures and Suggested Reading for the Twentieth Annual Williamsburg Forum (Williamsburg, 1968), 43-45; "Textile Printing in Eighteenth-Century America," Magazine Antiques 94, no. 4 (October 1968): 536-40; "Eighteenth-Century English and American Furnishing Fabrics,"




Magazine Antiques 97, no. 2 (February 1970): 267-71; "Les matières textiles au XVIIIe siècle," intro. to Textiles et documents Maurapas, ed. Roland Lamontagne (Ottawa, 1970), 33-60; " 'Fortunes to Be Acquired': Textiles in Eighteenth- Century Rhode Island," Rhode Island History 31, nos. 2-3 (Spring and Summer, 1972): 53-63; "Room Furnishings as Seen in British Prints from the Lewis Walpole Library, Part I: Bed Hangings," Magazine Antiques 104, no. 6 (December 1973): 1068-75; "Room Furnishings as Seen in British Prints from the Lewis Walpole Library, Part II: Window Curtains, Upholstery and Slipcovers," Maga- zine Antiques 105, no. 3 (March 1974): 522-31; "Stylistic Changes in Printed Textiles," in Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl (Charlottes ville, 1974), 257-76; "Antique and Reproduction Furnishing Fabrics in Historic Houses and Period Rooms," Maga- zine Antiques 107, no. 1 (January 1975): 164-69; "1776 - How America Really Looked: Textiles," American Art Journal 7, no. 1 (May 1975): 82-91; "John Holker's Mid-Eighteenth-Century Livre d' énchantillons" in Studies in Textile His- tory in Memory of Harold B. Burnham, ed. Veronika Gervers (Toronto, 1977), 214-31; "Ceramics, Glass and Textiles at Yale," Magazine Antiques 117, no. 6 (June 1980): 1328-32.

NOTES

1. For a detailed historiography of American material culture studies through the mid-1970s, in-

cluding the study of American decorative arts, see Thomas J. Schiere th, "Material Culture Studies in

America, 1876-1976," in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. idem (Nashville, 1982). For a more recent account, see Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, "Shaping the Field: The Multi-

disciplinary Perspectives of Material Culture," in American Material Culture, ed. Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison (Winterthur, Del., 1997).

2. Although beyond the scope of this article, the

relationship of American decorative arts studies to white racial identity formation also warrants further examination.

3. For an account of cultural elites who pioneered the collection and study of early American decorative arts, see Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers: The Lives and Careers, the Deals, the Finds, the Collections of the Men and Women who were Re-

sponsible for the Changing Taste in American An-

tiques, 1850-1930 (New York, 1980). Along with the many men who dominated the early history of the field, Stillinger profiled four important women collectors: Louise du Pont Crowninshield, Electra

Havemeyer Webb, Katharine Prentis Murphy, and Ima Hogg. For an example of recent scholar-

ship reevaluating the role of early women collectors, see Morrison H. Heckscher, "Natalie K. Blair's 'Museum Rooms' and the American

Wing," Magazine Antiques 157, no. 1 (January 2000): 182-85.

4. Michael S. Kimmel, "Introduction: The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power," in The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katharine A. Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, Del., 1997), 2-3.

5. Everett V. Meeks, "Francis Patrick Garvan, 1875-1937," Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 8, no. 2 (February 1938): 35-36; Patricia Kane, "Florence Mellowes Montgomery, 1914-1998," Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1997-1998): 17.

6. Patricia Kane, "Charles F. Montgomery, 1910-

1978," Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 37, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 10-11.

7. For a definition of Modernist "good design" in an American postwar context, see Edgar Kauf- mann Jr., What is Modem Design? (New York, 1950). For an influential account of the history of

design in the United States written from an American exceptionalist perspective, see John A. Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Mod- em Civilization (Garden City, N.Y., 1948).

8. My consideration of the Montgomerys as a dual-career couple draws on studies of the artist and writer couples in Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. Significant Others:




Creativity and Intimate Partnership (New York, 1996).

9. Charles F. Montgomery, "Francis P. Garvan," Magazine Antiques 121, no. 1 (January 1982): 244- 49.

10. Ibid., 244; Gerald W. R. Ward, " 'A Wide View for American Art': The Goals of Francis P. Garvan, Collector," in Gerald W. R. Ward et al., Francis P. Garvan: Collector (New Haven, 1980), 11-12.

11. Montgomery, "Francis P. Garvan," 244. A man of considerable entrepreneurial talent, Brady amassed an estate valued at over fifty million dol- lars by the time of his death in 1913.

12. Stillinger, The Antiquers, 234-36. In 1906, Thaw shot and killed White in Madison Square Garden.

13. Ward, " 'A Wide View for American Art,' "

11-12.

14. Montgomery, "Francis P. Garvan," 244-46; Pa- tricia E. Kane, "Francis P. Garvan, Collector of American Decorative Arts," in Ward et al., Francis P. Garvan: Collector, 27-28.

15. For catalogues of influential early American silver exhibitions held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, see Richard T. H. Halsey and John H. Buck, American Silver, the Work of Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Century Silversmiths (Boston, 1906); and

George Munson Curtis and Florence V. Pauli

[Berger], American Church Silver of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, with a Few Pieces of Do- mestic Plate, exh. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1911).

16. For detailed accounts of Garvan's collecting practices, see Kane, "Francis P. Garvan, Collector"; and Helen A. Cooper, "Francis P. Garvan, Collec- tor of Paintings, Prints and Sculptures," in Ward et al., Francis P. Garvan: Collector, 27-64. Kane observed that the major influence on Garvan's initial silver acquisitions was the advice of Francis Hill

Bigelow, the organizer of the early American silver exhibitions of 1906 and 1911 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the author of Historic Silver

of the Colonies and Its Makers (New York, 1917). For his silver purchases during the 1920s, Garvan consulted Alfred E. Jones, author of The Old Silver

of American Churches (Letch worth, Eng., 1913). Kane also discussed Garvan's acquisitions of furniture, ceramics, glass, pewter, and iron.

17. Francis P. Garvan to George Parmly Day, Treasurer of Yale University, June 9, 1930, "Ap- pendix A," in Ward et al., Francis P. Garvan: Collector, 68.


14-20. According to Ward, among those who broadened Garvan's collecting outlook were Luke Vincent Lockwood of the Brooklyn Museum and Richard T. H. Halsey of The Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art. After the Garvans lent pieces for the

opening of the Metropolitan's American Wing in 1924 and the "Exhibition of Early American Paint-

ings, Miniatures and Silver" at the National Gal-

lery of Art in 1925-1926, they began to consider their collection a national treasure rather than

personal property (p. 14).

19. Michael J. Ettema, "History Museums and the Culture of Materialism," in Past Meets Present:

Essays about Historic Interpretation and Public Audi' enees, ed. Jo Blatti (Washington, D.C., and Lon- don, 1987), 64-69.


14-15; William B. Rhoads, "The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of Immigrants," in The Colonial Revival in America, ed Alan Axelrod (New York and London, 1985), 348-49. Ward cited a

quotation in the New York Sun (July 26, 1930), in which Garvan, referring to Luke Vincent Lock- wood and Richard T. H. Halsey, stated that "the

country can never repay these two men for what

they have done in the way of stimulating interest in antiques and consequently arousing an appreci- ation of more beautiful household furnishings. Both are pioneers and their knowledge and cultivated instinct for fineness have had a further effect than either will admit or even realize" (pp. 14-15).

21. Richard T. H. Halsey and Elizabeth Tower, The Homes of Our Ancestors (Garden City, N.Y., 1925), xxii; as quoted in Rhoads, "The Colonial Revival and the Americanization of Immigrants," 349. Also see Wendy Kaplan, "R. T. H. Halsey: An

Ideology of Collecting American Decorative Arts," Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 43-53. Although Halsey is widely credited as the master- mind behind the American Wing's displays, recent

scholarship suggests more exchange of influence between period rooms in museums and private residences; see Heckscher, "Natalie K. Blair's 'Mu- seum Rooms' and the American Wing."

22. For a thorough exegesis of the Johnson-Reed Act, see chap. 11, "Closing the Gates," in John Higham's foundational text on American nativism, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865-1925 (New Brunswick, 1955).

23. Francis P. Garvan to George Parmly Day, "Ap- pendix A," 67.

24- Hollis French to Chauncey C. Nash, Secretary of the Walpole Society, undated letter published in The Walpole Society Note Book 1940 (Cambridge,

Mass., 1941); as quoted in Stillinger, The Antiquers, 167, 234.

25. Kane, "Francis P. Garvan, Collector," 28.

26. Ian Pickford, ed., Pocket Edition, Jackson's Hall- marks (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng., and Wap- pingers' Falls, N.Y., 1992), 13, 14.

27. Sylvia Yount, Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966 (New York, 1999), 93-95. According to Yount, Parrish originally produced Quod Er at Demonstran- dum for an overmantel in New York City's Meeting House Club.

28. Francis P. Garvan to George Parmly Day, "Ap- pendix A," 68.

29. Charles Messer Stow, New York Sun (May 23, 1947).


18.

31. John Marshall Phillips, "Autobiography (Written by John Marshall Phillips in 1942)," Bul- letin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 21, no. 1 (October 1953): n.p.

32. Ibid. Phillips taught his course for two decades. The title and range of dates varied, but its most

longstanding appellation was "Art 36, The Arts and Crafts in America, 1630-1830"; American Arts Office files, Yale University Art Gallery. Richard T. H. Halsey has been credited with

teaching the first course in American decorative arts, at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1928 to 1932. Halsey also lectured on Amer- ican decorative arts at Yale University from 1936 to 1942. See Kaplan, "R. T. H. Halsey," 44.

33. Montgomery, "Francis P. Garvan," 248.

34- Joseph Burke, "A Letter from Joseph Burke, Professor of the History of Art at the University of Melbourne, Australia . . .," Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 21, no. 1 (October 1953): n.p.

35. Charles H. Sawyer, "Excerpts from a Tribute to John Marshall Phillips by Charles H. Sawyer, Director of the Division of the Arts . . .," Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts at Yale University 21, no. 1 (October 1953): n.p.

36. Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz, Women at Yale: Liberating a College Campus (Indianapolis and New York, 1971), 35.

37. Aaron Betsky, James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture of Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1994), 10, 31, 103-5; and chap. 5, "Bright College Years," 139-62.




38. Yale President James Rowland Angeli, as

quoted in "Harkness Millions for Yale Housing," New York Times (January 13, 1930); as cited by Betsky, James Gamble Rogers, 143, 250.

39. Betsky, James Gamble Rogers, 104.

40. Ibid., 10, 103-5; Patrick L. Pinnell, The Cam-

pus Guide: Yale University (New York, 1999), 57.

41. Gene Wise, "An American Studies Calendar," in "Special Section: The American Studies Move- ment: A Thirty-Year Retrospective," American

Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Bibliography Issue, 1979): 407- 47.

42. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, "Studying America and American Studies at Yale," American Quarterly 22, no. 2, pt. 2 (Summer 1970): 503-17.

43. Ibid., 511.

44. Prospectus of the American Studies Program, November 14, 1949; Records of Provost Edgar S.

Furniss, Yale University Archives; as cited by Mi- chael Holzman, "The Ideological Origins of Amer- ican Studies at Yale," American Studies 40, no. 2

(Summer 1999): 71-99.

45. Holzman, "The Ideological Origins of Ameri- can Studies at Yale," 83-89. Holzman provides a detailed account of the delicate negotiations among Yale's administrators, faculty, fund-raisers, and potential donors that culminated in gifts to Yale's American Studies Program from the wealthy businessman William Robertson Coe: $500,000 in 1950 to endow a professorship and $1.24 million in addition on his death in 1954.

46. Charles F. Montgomery, "The First Ten Years of Winterthur as a Museum," Winterthur Portfolio 1

(1964): 52-79.

47. Wayne Craven, "The Winterthur Program in

Early American Culture: An Experiment in a

Joint-Institutional Inter-Disciplinary Curriculum," Winterthur Portfolio 1 (1964): 139-49.

48. Stillinger, The Antiquers, 222-25; Jay E. Can- tor, Winterthur, rev. ed. (New York, 1997), 32, 65, 113-18.

49. Francis P. Garvan to Henry Francis du Pont, February 27, 1930, Registrar's Office, Winterthur Museum; as quoted in Stillinger, The Antiquers, 237.

50. Stillinger, The Antiquers, 229, 230.

51. Ibid., 230; Charles F. Montgomery, Classics and Collectibles: American Antiques as History and Art," ARTnews 76, no. 9 (November 1977): 126-36.

52. Cantor, Winterthur, 118, 197. Cantor noted that, as early as 1927, du Pont inquired about the

process by which Isabella Stewart Gardner's house in Boston became a museum. Cantor also observed that, by the 1940s, the tax advantages to be gained from nonprofit status were an important consideration in du Pont's decision to open Winterthur to the general public.

53. Montgomery, "The First Ten Years of Winter- thur as a Museum," 58.

54. Cantor, Winterthur, 199-201; Montgomery, "The First Ten Years of Winterthur as a Museum," 58.

55. Craven, "The Winterthur Program in Early American Culture," 139-44, 147-49; University of

Delaware, J 997- i 998 Graduate Catalog (Newark, Del., 1997), 1, 120; The Society of Winterthur Fellows, Alumni Directory, September 1999 (Win- terthur, Del., 1999), 54-58. Founded in 1743, the

University of Delaware established a women's col-

lege in 1921 and became a coeducational institution in 1945. The first class of Winterthur students was composed of two women and three men. Class sizes and sex ratios remained largely the same until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when male students

predominated (the classes of 1959 through 1962 each consisted of one woman and four men). Class sizes increased during the 1960s, capping at ten students per class in 1972. From the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s, sex ratios swung back and forth. Since the class of 1978, there has been a

preponderance of female students (with the exception of the class of 1994, which had a 1:1 sex ratio).

56. The Society of Winterthur Fellows, Alumni

Directory; Peter Hawes et al., "A Great Panorama":

Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of American Arts at Yale (New Haven, 1998), 57-58.

57. Barbara M. Ward and Gerald W. R. Ward, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M. Mont-

gomery: A Tribute (New Haven, 1978), 41; "Charles F. Montgomery, 67, Dies; Professor of Art

History at Yale," New York Times (February 22, 1978), B2.

58. Edward S. Cooke Jr., conversation with author, February 17, 2000; David Barquist, conversation with author, February 23, 2000; Barbara McLean Ward, "Pewter and Britannia Metal," in Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in Amer- ica, 1650-1920: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. Kenneth L. Ames and Gerald W. R. Ward (Win- terthur, Del., 1989), 159-60.

59. The Pewter Collectors' Club of America, The Pewter Collectors' Club of America Boston Exhibi- tion, 1935 (Boston, 1935), n.p.

60. Ward and Ward, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M. Montgomery: A Tribute, 41.

61. Ibid., 58; "Florence Montgomery, Art Histo- rian, Expert on Early American Textiles," New Haven Register (January 23, 1998), A16; Barquist, conversation.

62. Agnes Mongan, "Harvard and the Fogg," in The Early Years of Art History in the United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching and Scholars, ed. Craig Hugh Smith and Peter M. Luke- hart (Princeton, 1993), 49-50. According to Mon-

gan, the Fogg Art Museum course, instituted by Paul Sachs, Harvard class of 1900, was one of the first of its kind.

63. Ward and Ward, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M. Montgomery, 58.

64. Ibid., 42, 59; Montgomery, "The First Ten Years of Winterthur as a Museum," 58-73.

65. Florence M. Montgomery, "An Amelung Sugar Bowl," Journal of Glass Studies 1 (1959): 89-93.

66. Cooke, conversation; Barquist, conversation; Adrienne D. Hood, "Textiles," in Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in America, ed. Ames and Ward, 265-80.

67. Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650-1870 (New York, 1984), 138.

68. Ibid., 130-31, 138.

69. Patricia Kane, conversation with author, Sep- tember 3, 1999. For an excellent overview of du Pont's textile collecting philosophy and practice, see Jessica June Eldredge,

" 'In Themselves a Tex- tile Museum': The Formation of the Textile Col- lection at the H. F. du Pont Winterthur Museum" (master's thesis, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, University of Delaware, 1999).

70. Jeni Sandberg, "Visions of Early America: Ernest Lo Nano and Upholstery in Historic Inte- riors" (paper presented at "New Visions, New Quests" symposium sponsored by the Decorative Arts Society and Winterthur Museum, Garden and

Library, Winterthur, Del., October 12, 1996). Flo- rence Montgomery offered her perspectives on pre- 1970 textile display and conservation practices, including those of du Pont, versus more recent considerations of antique textiles as documents in "Textiles for the Period Room in America," in idem, Textiles in America, 129-40.

71. Cooke, conversation.

72. Montgomery, "Classics and Collectibles," 132.

Montgomery cited the following examples of pri-




vate collections that became public in the mid- to late 1940s: Old Sturbridge Village in Massachu- setts (collection of Albert and Cheney Wells, 1946) and the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (collection of Electra Havemeyer Webb, 1947).

73. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objec- tivity Question" and the American Historical Profes- sion (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 333.

74. Ibid., 332-35.

75. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948; reprint, New York, 1973); as

quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 333.

76. Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Poli- tics (Chicago, 1953); as quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 333.

77. Montgomery, "The First Ten Years of Winter- thur as a Museum," 65; and "Classics and Collect- ibles," 132-34. The series "America's Arts and Skills" appeared in Life magazine at intervals of

approximately six weeks, from April 18, 1955, to

May 21, 1956. The book America's Arts and Skills, by the editors of Life, was published by E. P. Dut- ton, New York, in 1957, with an introduction by Charles F. Montgomery.

78. Life 38, no. 16 (April 18, 1955).

79. Schlereth, "Material Culture Studies in Amer- ica, 1876-1976," 64.

80. Ibid., 65.

81. As previously cited, a key text in this genre was John A. Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Modem Civilization (1948). Schlereth also

pointed to such monumental works as Daniel Boorstin's multivolume series, The Americans, issued in 1958, 1965 and 1973; and Alan Gowans, Images of American Living: Four Centuries of Archi- tecture and Furniture as Cultural Expression (Phila- delphia, 1964).

82. Andrew Heiskell, Life 38, no. 15 (April 11, 1955), 116.

83. Ibid., 116.

84. Ibid.

85. Editors of Life, America's Arts and Skills (New York, 1957), 9-36.

86. Ibid., 15, 29.

87. Ibid., 29.

öö. Criarles Montgomery, Introduction, in Edi- tors of Life, America's Arts and Skills, 9. The author of the famous Modernist slogan was the architect Louis Sullivan. See Kenneth Frampton, Modern

Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. (New York, 1985), 56.

89. Regarding racial difference, the Life series mentioned enslaved African-Americans only in the context of a celebratory account of Eli Whit-

ney's cotton gin as fifty times more efficient than a slave (p. 78). According to "Part VII: The Timeless Southwest," encounters between Native Ameri- cans and Hispanos resulted in "a blend of Indian and Spanish" culture that gave rise to "the unique style of the Southwest," which was epitomized by "a striking and timeless design in architecture, as valid today as it was a millennium ago" (pp. 113, 115).

90. Editors of Life, America's Arts and Skills, 15.

91. Ibid., 15-36.

92. Ibid., 27, 57.

93. Carole Shammas, "How Self-Sufficient was

Early America?" Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13, no. 2 (Autumn 1982): 247-72; Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Expe- rience in Early America," American Historical Re- view 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 593-619.

94. Hood, "Textiles," 267.

95. For a detailed historical account of this vi-

gnette's popularity in New England, see Jane C.

Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760-1860 (New York, 1993).

96. Editors of Life, America's Arts and Skills, 145- 47.

97. "Anthony Garvan, 80, Architectural Histori- an," New York Times (January 14, 1992), B6.

98. Murray G. Murphey, "American Civilization at Pennsylvania," American Quarterly 22, no. 2, pt. 2 (Summer 1970): 489-502.

99. Anthony N. B. Garvan, "Historical Depth in

Comparative Culture Study," American Quarterly 14, no. 2, pt. 2: supplement (Summer 1962): 260- 74.

100. Kane, "Charles F. Montgomery, 1910-1978," 10-11.

101. Charles F. Montgomery, "Some Remarks on the Practice and Science of Connoisseurship," in The Walpole Society Note Book, 1961 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 56-69.

102. Ibid., 58-69.

103. Cooke, conversation. E.g., Montgomery en-

couraged students to enroll in Dale Carnegie classes.

104. For the paradigmatic study of the formation of cultural capital, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

105. Charles F. Montgomery, American Furniture: The Federal Period, in the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum (New York, 1966).

106. Barbara McLean Ward and Gerald W. R. Ward, "American Furniture to 1820," in Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in America, ed. Ames and Ward, 98-99.

107. Florence M. Montgomery, "Upholstery and

Furnishing Fabrics," in Charles F. Montgomery, American Furniture: The Federal Period, 41-47.

108. Lisa L. Lock, "Editor's Note," Winterthur Port-

folio 34, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1-2.

109. Milo N. Naeve, "Statement of Editorial Pol-

icy," Winterthur Portfolio 1 (1964); as quoted in Lock, "Editor's Note," 1.

110. Lock, "Editor's Note," 1.

111. Jules David Prown, conversation with author, November 18, 1999.

112. Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley (Cambridge, Mass., 1966); Carrie Rebora, "Copley and Art History: The Study of America's First Old Master," in Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York, 1995), 15-17. An- other member of Yale's History of Art department, the Mesoamericanist George Kubier (1912-1996), also ultimately had an important impact on U.S. material culture studies through his book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London, 1962).

113. Prown, conversation; Kane, "Charles F.

Montgomery, 1910-1978," 10.

114. Hawes et al., "A Great Panorama," 56-57.

115. Montgomery, "Francis P. Garvan," 249.

116. The Mabel Brady Garvan Galleries: American Arts and the American Experience (June 3, 1973), 1-36 (a tabloid-format exhibition guide jointly published by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Newtown Bee, Newtown, Conn.). During his tenure, Jules Prown undertook preliminary planning for the Garvan collection's reinstallation, in-

cluding securing a pledge of funds from Mabel

Brady Garvan in 1967. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided financial support for a multimedia display, the tabloid publication, and two fellowships for training Yale graduate students in museum practice.




117. Montgomery, "Francis P. Garvan," 248-49.

118. The Mabel Brady Garvan Galleries, exh.

guide, 2.

119. I am indebted to Bryan Wolf for sharing his

unpublished paper, "Chairs up the Wall: Geoffrey Hartman, the American Arts Installation at the Yale Art Gallery, and the Cold War," regarding the 1973 reinstallation of the Garvan collection.

120. The Mabel Brady Garvan Galleries, exh. guide, 34.

121. See James Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart, and

Ray Eames, Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (New York, 1989), and Pat

Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames, Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and Lon-

don, 1995).

122. As acknowledged in the exh. guide, The Ma- bel Brady Garvan Galleries, 2, the curatorial team included Montgomery, Stebbins, Kane, Lovell, and the special assistant Oswaldo Rodriguez.

123. Kane, conversation; Kane, "Florence Mel- lowes Montgomery, 1914-1998," 17.

124. Ward and Ward, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M. Montgomery, 59, 64; Florence M.

Montgomery, Printed Textiles: English and American Cottons and Unens, 17004850 (New York, 1970).

125. Kane, conversation; Kane, "Florence Mel- lowes Montgomery, 1914-1998," 17; Ward and

Ward, eds., Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M.

Montgomery, 59.

126. Wendell Garrett, "Introduction," in Charles F. Montgomery and Florence M. Montgomery, ed. Ward and Ward, 13.

127. Nicola Courtright, conversation with author, February 25, 2000; Barbara Robinson, conversation with author, June 5, 2001; "Florence Montgomery, Art Historian, Expert on Early American Tex-

tiles," New Haven Register (January 23, 1998), A16.

According to the Art Department records at Southern Connecticut State University, Florence

Montgomery taught "Art 319: History of American Crafts and Decorative Art" in the spring of 1981 and 1985.

128. Kane, "Florence Mellowes Montgomery, 1914-1998," 17.

129. Hood, "Textiles," 278.

130. See Schlereth, "Material Culture Studies in

America, 1876-1976." According to Schlereth, "Material culture properly connotes physical manifestations of culture and therefore embraces those

segments of human learning and behavior which

provide a person with plans, methods and reasons for producing and using things that can be seen and touched. In this sense, material culture con- stitutes an abbreviation for artifacts in a cultural context" (p. 2). For Schlereth, "Material culture

study is, therefore, the study of artifacts (and other

pertinent historical evidence) of the belief sys- tems - the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions - of a particular community or society, usu-

ally across time" (p. 3).

131. Prown, conversation. For a historiography of American "new social history" during the 1960s and 1970s, see Novick, That Noble Dream, 440-45. Novick's account emphasizes the influence of the British Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thomp- son's The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1964. According to Novick, "The phrase 'history from the bottom up,' popularized by Jesse Lemisch in the 1960s, and probably independently coined, dated back to at least 1923, when Frederick

Jackson Turner used it in a letter" (p. 442). Novick

broadly defined the new social history as "studies of the everyday experience of popular classes, whether in cities, factories, or the home; regardless of the race or gender of those studied: it thus includes much (though not all) of what are sometimes separately designated as urban, labor, family, black, and women's history" (p. 440). New social

history often also entails quantitative methods; Novick points to the development of social scientific history in relation to "hyperempiricist" postwar sociology, political science, and economics

(pp. 382-87).

132. Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 14004800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York, 1975), originally published as Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (XVe-XVIÍJe siècle), (Paris, 1967); Robert Blair St. George, "Introduction," in Mate- rial Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. idem (Boston, 1988), 3-7; idem, "Afterthoughts on Material Life in America, 1600-1860: Household Space in Bos-

ton, 1670-1730," Winterthur Portfolio 32, no. 1

(Spring 1997): 2-5. The Annales school, as it came to be known in the United States, derived its name from the French journal Annales: Économies, Soci-

étés, Civilisations.

133. Schlereth, "Material Culture Studies in

America, 1876-1976," 36-37.

134. Feminist interpretations of material culture that came to fruition in the early 1980s include: Lizabeth A. Cohen, "Embellishing a Life of Labor: An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915," Journal of American Culture 3, no. 4 (Winter 1980): 752-75; Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the

Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural

Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago and Lon-

don, 1980); Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for Amer- ican Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1981); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household

Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave

(New York, 1982); and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982).

135. Ian M. G. Quimby, ed., Material Culture and the Study of American Life (New York, 1978), xi.

136. Martin and Garrison, "Shaping the Field: The Multidisciplinary Perspectives of Material

Culture," 1-2.

137. Prown, conversation; Michael Cowan, "The National Humanities Institute: The First Year," American Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Bibliography Issue, 1976): 378-86.

138. Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Vir-

ginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville, Tenn., 1975).

139. Prown, conversation.

140. Jules David Prown, "Style as Evidence," Win- terthur Portfolio 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1980): 197-210; and idem, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method," Winterthur

Portfolio 17, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1-19; Lock, "Ed- itor's Note," 2.

141. Prown, "Mind in Matter," 1.

142. Ibid., 7-10.

143. St. George, editor's note on "Mind in Matter" as reprinted in Material Life in America, 17.

144- Montgomery, "Classics and Collectibles," 136; Cooke, conversation; Hawes et al., "A Great

Panorama," 4, 17.

145. Maude Southwell Wahlman, "The Art of Afro-American Quiltmaking: Origins, Develop- ment and Significance" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univer-

sity, 1980); Catherine Lynn, "Wallpaper in Amer- ica: The Seventeenth Century to World War I"

(Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1981).

146. June Stephanie Sprigg, "Women's Everyday Lives in Eighteenth-Century Northeastern Amer- ica" (master's thesis, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, University of Delaware, 1977); David Lawrence Barquist, "The Meaning of Taste for Wealthy Philadelphians, 1750-1800" (master's thesis, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, University of Delaware, 1981); Wendy




Joan Kaplan, "R. T. H. Halsey: An Ideology of

Collecting American Decorative Arts" (master's thesis, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, University of Delaware, 1980).

147. See the historiographies cited in nn. 1 and 3.

148. Garrett, "Introduction," in Charles F . Mont-

gomery and Florence M. Montgomery, ed. Ward and Ward, 12.

149. Cooper, "Francis P. Garvan, Collector of

Paintings, Prints and Sculpture," 45-51.

150. See Steven M. Gelbar, "Do-It- Yourself: Con-

structing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic

Masculinity," American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (March 1997): 66-112; and idem, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York, 1999).

151. Better Homes & Gardens Decorating Book (Des Moines, Iowa, 1956), 341.

152. For an overview of changes in scholarship produced through the 1980s on the material cul-

ture of American domestic life, see Kenneth L. Ames, "Introduction," in Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings in America, 1650-1870, ed. Ames and Ward, 9-23. The development of the literature on material culture and taste formation as well as material culture and gender continued in the 1990s. For an important study of gentility and material culture in eighteenth- and nine-

teenth-century America, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992). For recent essays on gender and material culture, see Elizabeth Collins

Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, eds., Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture V (Knox ville, Tenn., 1995); and Mar- tinez and Ames, eds., The Material Culture of Gender.

153. For a discussion of gender and inheritance in

early America, see Barbara McLean Ward, "Wom- en's Property and Family Continuity in Eigh- teenth-Century Connecticut," in Early American

Probate Inventories, ed. Peter Benes (Boston, 1989); and Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1986).

154. The literature on women and consumption is considerable. For an excellent bibliography, see Ellen Furlough, "Gender and Consumption in His- torical Perspective: A Selected Bibliography," in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in His- torical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen

Furlough (Berkeley, 1996), 389-409.

155. See n. 55.

156. At the time this article went to press, Leslie Greene Bowman was the director of the Winter- thur Museum and James C. Curtis was the director of the Winterthur Program in Early American Cul- ture. At Yale, the curator of the Garvan collection was Patricia Kane and the Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts was Edward S. Cooke Jr.



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