Two Philadelphia shadow-box grottoes

Magazine Antiques, March, 2002 by Laura Keim Stutman

(1.) John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination. 1600-1750 (1986; University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1996), p.73.

(2.) Ibid.

(3.) A third shellwork grotto shadow box is in thc collection of the Winterthur Museum in Winterthur; Delaware. It shares some stylistic parallels with thc two discussed in this article but has an entirely different case, and its provenance is unclear; which is why I have not included it in this small investigation.

(4.) Elizabeth McLean and Mark Reinberger; "Isaac Norris's Fairhill: Architecture, Landscape, and Quaker Ideals in a Philadelphia Colonial Country Scat," Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 32, no. 4 (Winter 1997), p. 274. Fairhill was built by Isaac Norris Sr. (1671-1735) between 1712 and 1717 and improved by subsequent generations before being burned by the British in 1777.

(5.) Milcah Martha Moores Boak: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1997), pp. 208-209. Elizabeth Graeme maintained a literary salon at Cinema Park, her house north of Philadelphia near Horsham. Among her circle of literary correspondents were Quakers Susanna Wright (1697-1784), Hannah Griffiths (1727-1817), and Milcah Moore (1740-1829).

(6.) Ibid

(7.) Hazelle Jackson, Shell Houses and Grottoes (Shire Publications, Princes Risborough. Buckinghamshire, 2001),p. 11.

(8.) Ibid., p.9. In Epistle IV of his Moral Essays, for instance, Pope wrote "To build, to plant, whatever you intend/To rear the column, or the arch to bend,/To swell the terrace, or to sink the grot/In all, let Nature never be forgot" (quoted in Miles Hadfield, The English Landscape Garden [Shire Publications, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. 1997], p. 18).

(9.) Jackson, Shell Houses, p. 11.

(10) Ibid.

(11.) Basildon Park Berkshire (National Trust, London, 1980), p.28.

(12.) Anne Reckless, the daughter of Joseph and Margaret Reckless of Chesterfield, New Jersey married George Emlen (1718-1776), a successful brewer, on December 25, 1740. His sister Hannah (1722-1777) was married to William Logan of Stanton.

(13.) Although there is no known reason to dispute the attribution, there were four other Annes in the Emlen family in the eighteenth century: Ann (b. 1705), the daughter of George and Hannah Garrett Emlen. who married William Miller in 1732; Anne Reckless and George Emlen's own daughter, Anne (known as Nancy). who married Warner Millin in 1788; Anne (1777-1851). the daughter of George (1741-1812) and Sarah Fishbourne Emlen (b. 1756); and Anne, the daughter of Caleb (b. 1744) and Mary Warder Emlen, who married Charles Pleasants in 1796.

(14.) McLean and Reinberger, "Isaac Norris's Fairhill," p.272.

(15.) Frank Willing Leach, Emlen Family: One of the Series of Sketches for the Philadelphia North American. 1907-1913. and brought down to date. 1932 (Historical Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1932). [p.71.

(16.) The beadwork lion was likely prefabricated and made in England.