Domestic Furnishings - Overview
Washboards, armchairs, lamps, and pots and pans may not seem to be museum pieces. But they are invaluable evidence of how most people lived day to day, last week or three centuries ago. The Museum's collections of domestic furnishings comprise more than 40,000 artifacts from American households. Large and small, they include four houses, roughly 800 pieces of furniture, fireplace equipment, spinning wheels, ceramics and glass, family portraits, and much more.
The Arthur and Edna Greenwood Collection contains more than 2,000 objects from New England households from colonial times to mid-1800s. From kitchens of the past, the collections hold some 3,300 artifacts, ranging from refrigerators to spatulas. The lighting devices alone number roughly 3,000 lamps, candleholders, and lanterns.
"Domestic Furnishings - Overview" showing 1 items.
Grandpapa's Pet
- Description (Brief)
- Sentimental genre prints documented the social image of Victorian virtue through domestic scenes of courtship, family, home life, and images of the “genteel female.” Children are depicted studying nature or caring for their obedient pets as they learn their place in the greater world. Romantic scenes picture devoted husbands with their contented, dutiful wives. In these prints, young women educated in reading, music, needlework, the arts, the language of flowers, basic math and science are subjugated to their family’s needs.
- These prints became popular as lithography was introduced to 19th Century Americans. As a new art form, it was affordable for the masses and provided a means to share visual information by crossing the barriers of race, class, and language. Sentimental prints encouraged the artistic endeavors of schoolgirls and promoted the ambitions of amateur artists, while serving as both moral instruction and home or business decoration. They are a pictorial record of our romanticized past.
- This is a lithotint; interior scene of a seated older man with his cane and a dog sleeping near his feet. A standing child is facing him. Simple furnishings include a bench, chest or bureau, and a chair. A plant, shovel and saw are also depicted.
- The inscription indicates that the print was drawn specifically for Miss Leslie's Magazine and published in April 1843, in the year the periodical debuted. This print was considered the first true lithotint produced in the US, the result of a partnership and experiments between artist/ draftsman John H. Richard and printer/lithographer Peter S. Duval in 1841/1842. The print was described in Miss Leslie's as a product of both art and technology and considered a great breakthrough in publishing. It was printed in color from one stone.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1843
- artist
- Richard, John H.
- lithographer
- Duval, Peter S.
- ID Number
- DL*60.2226
- catalog number
- 60.2226
- accession number
- 228146
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center