Colonial Williamsburg at home and on the road

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2001 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The extensive holdings of the Colonial Williamburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia, now number some sixty thousand objects. A fraction of them are illustrated and discussed in this issue, which celebrates Williamsburg's seventy-fifth anniversary. The foundation has also organized an exhibition that will be the centerpiece of the Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue and Sixty - seventh Street in New York City, from January 19 to January 28. Proceeds from the antiques show benefit the East Side House Settlement, which provides a number of services, including after-school programs for children in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, the most impoverished congressional district in the nation.

The exhibition at the armory is entitled "The Best is not Too Good For You": Colonial Williamsburg Celebrates 75 Years of Collecting and includes four dozen objects drawn from their extensive holdings of paintings, furniture, silver, ceramics, folk art, prints, tools, costumes, and textiles made between 1612 and 1929. The objects selected for the show represent the diversity of material in the collections and are revealing for what they tell us about colonial society in Virginia and the English influence on its early history.

Closer to home, the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg has organized a long-term exhibition devoted to upholstery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Entitled Curtains, Cases and Covers: Textiles for the American Home, 1700-1845, it is on view through September 2, 2002. Textiles in the eighteenth century were not only among the most costly of all household items, they were also the single largest category of imports into the colonies. Upholsterers of the period functioned much as interior designers do today and were responsible for far more than attaching fabric to furniture. They provided drapery for beds, curtains for windows, coverings for seats, cushions for chairs, and in some cases assisted in coordinating the finished look of an interior. Bed hangings, usually the most expensive of all textiles used in the home, could require as much as fifty yards of fabric. Thus elegantly draped beds were status symbols of the era. The exhibition also includes accessories required for the installation of textiles such as cloak pins (illustrated above), used to hold the cords needed for raising and lowering bed hangings or window curtains, and the decorative brass tacks found on so many chairs of the period. This exhibition provides a fascinating look at a craft that is far removed today from what it was centuries ago.