#winterthur museum

[moreroom4happiness]

Dried flower Christmas tree. Winterthur Museum Garden and Library in Wilmington, Delaware.

[bevanne46]

Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library

Entering our Dried-Flower Tree era.

A Yuletide tradition at Winterthur since 1986, the Dried-Flower Tree is adorned with flowers from Winterthur’s grounds and takes a talented team of staff and volunteers about 70 hours to decorate.

Learn more about this stunning floral masterpiece: https://www.winterthur.org/a-yuletide-floral-tradition/

[arthistoryanimalia]

Sauce tureen shaped like an Asiatic dormouse

Made in Jingdezhen, China; about 1745

Spotted at the “Outside In: Nature-inspired Design at Winterthur” exhibition

[hipstafootprint]

To Infinity and Beyond · Museum of Art Winterthur · Switzerland

[iiireflexiii]

View of the Öd (1879) by Hans Thoma (German, 1839-1924); oil on paper, on card; Kunst Museum Winterthur (Switzerland)

[la-quotidienne-cest-moi]

[abwwia]

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Composition, c. 1918, graphite and body colors on paper, Kunst Museum Winterthur, Donated by Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, 1977.  © SIK-ISEA, Zürich (Jean-Pierre Kuhn). © 2023 Stiftun Arp e.V., Berlin / Rolandswerth / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

[history-of-fashion]

1726-1730 John Smibert - Sarah Middlecott Boucher (Mrs. Louis Boucher)

(Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library)

[thepaintedroom]

Georg Friedrich Kersting (German, 1785-1847) • Reading by Lamplight • 1814 • Kunst Museum, Winterthur, Switzerland

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Rumor Goes Traveling: 2018 Edition

By popular request, photos from my 2018 trip to Britain. It was a little birthday gift to myself. The weather was classically British (overcast and grey most of the time). The trip started in Edinburgh, then we went down to the Lake District, then in Wales for a bit, before heading to London with stops in Bath, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Stonehenge, and Windsor along the way.

I did not realize how many places my tour went to that overlapped with royal history. I'll use this post as a table of contents-like thing with all the links to the different posts, but you'll also be able to find them at the tag.

Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh

Museum of Fashion, Bath

Lacock Village, Wiltshire

Caernarfon Castle, Wales

Windsor Castle

National Portrait Gallery, London

The Tardis

Taking a Walk Through Hyde Park, from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace

Kensington Palace State Apartments Tour, London

The Queen Victoria Exhibit at Kensington Palace, London

Some Jewelry at Kensington Palace, London

Diana: Her Fashion Story, a Kensington Palace Exhibition

Costuming The Crown, Winterthur Museum (Delaware)

[jurakan]

Poison books!

Two of you came in my inbox asking for the poison books thing, so it’s gonna go to the first person who asked. So! Today You Learned about the Poison Book Project!

Back in 2019, Melissa Tedone, the head of material conservation, at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library in Delaware, noticed that there was something weird about an 1857 book she was working on. Bits of green paint were flaking off the cover! That’s not great. She sent it to the lab and found that the green pigment contained copper and, uh, arsenic.

That’s a poison, btw.

They found eight more books in their collection that had arsenic in the binding.

So it seems that in the mid-1800s, book cloth was used instead of leather binding, and those were colored with different pigments, including something called ‘Paris Green’ which is made with arsenic. Books stopped being made with arsenic not because they were poison, but because the color fell out of fashion.

Now, okay, unless you put the book in your mouth or something, you’ll probably not get poisoned by an antique book. Still! A lot of these texts are used by antiquarians and researchers, who are likely to handle them much more and get affected by the poison. It’s important to identify it, then. As a result, the University of Delaware launched the Poison Book Project, in which researchers and collectors can send in their antique books and see if they’re full of poison. They also send researchers to smaller collections who can’t afford to ship or lose texts, and help them figure out what is and isn’t poison.

And it’s not just arsenic! That story I linked to? It opens describing the case of Sarah Mentock, who sent in her antique copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Lord of the Isles which contained arsenic, lead, and mercury. When the Poison Book Project got it, they sent a reply telling Mentock that this was the most poisonous book they’d ever tested.

These books are all poisonous. That’s insane, guys. Again, you’re not going to die, or even probably get sick, by touching them, but don’t touch your face afterward. 

Poisonous books. That’s A Thing That Exists.

[arthistoryanimalia]

That face 😂😂😂

Wolf figure

Made in Jingdezhen, China; about 1800

Spotted at the “Outside In: Nature-inspired Design at Winterthur” exhibition

[ericmenchersnapshots]

Life’s Patterns . Anniversary . Forgotten (at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp7xo-rOUTs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hipstafootprint]

Inner Space · Museum of Art Winterthur · Switzerland

[djeheuty-bros]

Hello! If you are interested in Egyptology and the Fayum “mummy portraits,” do I have the virtual event for you! This event is on Zoom and completely free. 

Face to Face: Conservation Research on 'Mummy Portraits' in the Detroit Area

February 28th at 6:30 PM Virtual event on Zoom

Join us for an evening of conversation with conservators Caroline Roberts and Ellen Hanspach-Bernal who will be sharing their research on Egyptian "mummy" panel portraits at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Register via link http://bit.ly/3JSJb7F

Speaker Profiles: Caroline Roberts Talk title: Reengaging with Roman Egyptian portraits and panel paintings through technical research at the Kelsey Museum Bio: Caroline Roberts is an archaeological conservator and a graduate of the Winterthur / University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Carrie’s professional background includes post-graduate fellowships at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research interests include the conservation of stone artifacts and architecture in museum and field settings, the characterization of ancient polychromy, and preventive conservation. Carrie’s conservation fieldwork experience includes seasons at Kaman-Kalehöyük in Turkey, Selinunte in Sicily, El-Kurru in Sudan, and Abydos in Egypt. She is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation.

Ellen Hanspach-Bernal Talk title: Deconstructing an Ancient Egyptian Mummy Portrait at the Detroit Institute of Arts Bio: Ellen Hanspach-Bernal is a 2006 graduate of the art conservation program at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden. From 2006 to 2009 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in painting conservation at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. She has worked for Klassik Stiftung Weimar and for the Conservation Centre for the Museums of the City of Erfurt, Thüringen, in Germany. In 2015 she returned to the United States to work as Conservator of Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Image credit: 25.2, Egyptian, Head of a Woman at the Detroit Institute of Arts

[barbmayberry]

Winterthur Museum