The David Rittenhouse astronomical and musical clock now in the collection of Drexel University in West Philadelphia has been called the "Most Important Clock in America". It is a stunning achievement. The gearing calculations would have been difficult if Rittenhouse had access to modern computing technologies. That this work was done by hand calculation in … Continue reading Drexel’s Rittenhouse
Woodworking
A Sneak Preview: Newport in New Haven
In this blog I don't write about my day-to-day work with the Dietrich American Foundation's furniture collection that we are in the process of researching, photographing, and conserving. That will remain proprietary to the Foundation as we gear-up to go live with a website of the Foundation’s collection in the near future. Findings from the … Continue reading A Sneak Preview: Newport in New Haven
Catching Up
There were several questions I didn’t have the answer to during my week teaching at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. I’m using this post to correct that with the hope that those who attended the class stop in here from time to time. Several years ago I decided to make an another attempt at … Continue reading Catching Up
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” Cormac McCarthy
In 2011, a wide audience was introduced to a genre painting by Thomas Hicks (1823-1890) of a kitchen interior while it was on loan to Winterthur Museum as part of the exhibition “Paint, Pattern and People, Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725-1850”. It was also included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition as figure 3.1, heading … Continue reading “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” Cormac McCarthy
“A Table to Suit”
In January we had the opportunity to examine a c. 1715 Delaware River Valley dressing table at Christie's. Furniture historians have been aware of this table since the publication of Wallace Nutting's Furniture of the Pilgrim Century 1620-1720 in 1921. It was subsequently illustrated as plate 394 in Nutting's Furniture Treasury, at the time in the … Continue reading “A Table to Suit”
In Proportion to the Trouble 