For Black History Month, the American Antiquarian Society is featuring historic objects from the collection that are associated with or depict Black Worcester residents. The Society’s portrait of John Moore Jr. was painted in Boston in 1826 when the sitter was in his twenties. He was the only son of John Moore Sr. (1751-1836), a ...
The American Antiquarian Society houses more than a thousand photographs and glass-plate negatives produced by photographer Theodore Clemens Wohlbrück (1879–1936) between 1900 and 1910. Since 2010, we have periodically highlighted different aspects of the collection on this blog, including information about Wohlbrück’s views of towns in Worcester County, his photographs of urban architecture, and a ...
The American Antiquarian Society’s collection of just over two hundred American silhouettes has recently been cataloged and photographed and an inventory of these profile portraits is now available via a new digital resource.
Silhouettes were popular in the United States starting at the end of the eighteenth century. Profile drawings, profile miniatures, and silhouettes all benefited ...
Portrait of T. P. and D. C. Collins. Daguerreotype, Philadelphia, 1846. With T. P. Collins. Unidentified Girl Holding a Book. Daguerreotype, Philadelphia, 1846.
This daguerreotype of brothers Thomas P. and David C. Collins lounging on a sofa was generously donated to AAS this spring by scholar Rebecca Norris. The donation was accompanied by the opportunity to ...
Harding, Chester, attr. Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838). Oil on canvas, [ca. 1830]
Salem navigator and mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch was also the author of several atlases and scientific publications which can be found in the AAS collection. Bowditch is perhaps most famous for his 1802 publication, The New American Practical Navigator, which went through several editions in ...
For those who may have missed David Jaffee's talk on "Learning to Look at Early American Material Culture" when he presented it at AAS this fall (or for those who want to see it again), you're in luck! The program will be airing on C-SPAN 3 this weekend at the following times:
Sat. 2/11 @ 11am ...
Fraud Week on Past is Present concludes today on an appropriately ambiguous note with examples from AAS's graphic arts collections, most of which are not true forgeries but rather what might be called wishful attributions. These works of art hover perpetually in "the limbo of doubtful pictures," to quote an earlier AAS librarian. ...
