James Madison's Montpelier We The People Fall 2015

WE THE PEOPLE Pan, Youths & Nymphs by Gerrit van Honthorst, ca. 1630 Painted Pearlware Saucer, 1820s, Excavated from the South Yard Hand-painted pearlwares were fashionable ceramics widely available in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s. This bowl in Montpelier’s archaeology study collection was owned by enslaved domestic servants at Montpelier living in one of the duplex houses in the South Yard during Madison’s retirement period. Archaeology enables us to understand the material culture of slavery. Enslaved people left few written records, so the material remains of their domestic lives provide essential evidence for how they lived. Enslaved people had ways of earning money: selling poultry, eggs, fish, garden produce, or crafts to occupants of the main house or at markets, receiving tips from visitors, or performing particularly dirty or dangerous tasks. With their income, enslaved people bought table wares for their homes, cloth, ribbon, buttons, and hooks for clothing, and other consumer goods. In this way, enslaved families negotiated small improvements in their living conditions within a system that denied their basic humanity. I had to choose a painting because my earliest training, as an undergraduate at Yale, was as a traditional art historian interested in the kinds of things you most commonly see on the walls of an art museum. Pan, Youths & Nymphs by Gerrit van Honthorst, dates to the 17th century (ca. 1630) and represents the kind of painting that the subjects of my Ph.D. dissertation, elite female art collectors in England, were acquiring at the time, as were other major collectors, like King Charles I. The Montpelier part of the story is interesting as well. This is the original canvas owned by the Madisons. Payne Todd acquired the painting during his stay in Europe (1813 to 1815), when he served as Albert Gallatin’s attaché during the negotiations for the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. So by the time Todd bought it, the painting was already almost two hundred years old and would have been considered the work of an Old Master. The painting celebrates sensuality and the Arcadian tradition, important themes of ancient art and literature that persisted into the 18th century. In the Montpelier Drawing Room, this picture displayed knowledge of the ancient world and of Old World high culture, within the context of the world they were helping to make anew. 14

James Madison's Montpelier We The People Fall 2015 | Page 14