12:00-1:00pm

Free admission

What do men’s wooden legs and women’s dressing tables have in common? Anglo-American residents of early American port cities amassed a variety of fine and decorative arts to assert their polite status. This talk will concentrate on the dressing furniture women used to prepare themselves for public scrutiny, the portraits artists painted of young women in courtship, and the wooden legs that men donned after the American Revolution. Together they reveal how material artifacts were vital for colonists’ transformation of themselves into polite people and for the creation of civil society in early America.

Speaker: Jennifer Van Horn, author of The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America and Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware

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