AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 115 Fig. 4: Light coming through the window highlights the wool damask design by Context Weavers, Lancashire, U.K.; trimmed with a wool and silk diamond design “cinnabar” tape by Thistle Hill Weavers in Cherry Hill, New York. Fig. 3: Arthur Devis (1712–1787), Portrait of Lady Juliana Fermor Penn, England, 1752. Oil on canvas, 36⅛ x 31⅛ inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 125th Anniversary Acquisition; Gift of Susanne Strassburger Anderson, Valerie Anderson Story, and Veronica Anderson Macdonald from the estate of Mae Bourne and Ralph Beaver Strassburger (2004, 2004-201-2). The design for the damask in the yellow lodging room was copied from the damask on the wall in this portrait. THE BEDSTEAD ANDWINDOWCURTAINS The yellow lodging room re-creation was based on meticulous research and some creative design choices. A multitude of English prints and the flying tester bedstead installed at Handel House Museum in London in 2005 were among the sources that provided inspiration and evidence for the bedstead design. The documentation and measurement of a rare, surviving early– eighteenth-century softwood baroque cornice at Walnford, in Monmouth County, New Jersey, contributed to the development of the form. 7 Comparisons with other eighteenth-century bedsteads, and scaling from William Stukeley’s 1729 sketch of his bedchamber at Grantham (Fig. 6), also contributed to the bedstead, built by Mike Podmaniczky. The cornice’s undulations generated the shapes for the valances and base valances hand- stitched by Elizabeth Paolini, who mastered the art of upholstering shellacked wood with cloth using hide glue. Because Sarah Read Logan’s (ca. 1692–1754) 1754 inventory for her yellow chamber listed “pairs” of curtains, we created paired panels and not draw-up curtains. 8 As the inventories did not mention window valances, they are not included. The bed and window curtains run on iron rods with brass rings, both fabricated by local blacksmith Luke DiBerardinis. The ring sizes are copied from pre-1760 archeological brass rings excavated at Stenton in 1982. The finishes analysis corroborated where the bedstead and maple high chest stood in the room. Sawn edges of the window seats on either side of the pier with the high chest show all the paint layers in the room, indicating they were cut before they were painted. Although the S-curved legs of the high chest could squeeze into the spot, the cutting of the window-seat edges lends a visual clearance that would only have mattered if visible. The previous floor-length window curtains designed in 1975 obscured those edges. By terminating the curtains at the window seats, the high-chest legs are now on full display (fig. 7). An additional cue to stop the curtains at the window seats is that the window openings are fifty inches wide, and from the top of the windows to the window seats is one hundred inches tall, a handsomely proportioned length at twice the width of the window. Recent paint analysis of architectural finishes on the walls and dye analysis of the yellow reverse side of a Logan family whole-cloth quilt dictated a reddish golden hue for the re-created “worsted [wool]