Day 366 - Alexandria ballroom and card table

 July 8, 2024

I am now officially beyond my 365th blogging visit to the Met - a good example of why one might want to give a project a title after it's completed rather than before! I have to say that the bloom is off the rose - I'm looking forward to ending this effort and moving on. But I'm still finding many things that interest me, all the better when they are unexpected.

Today's visit is a good example. When I first looked at gallery 719, my first thought was, "Another gallery filled with side chairs." But as it turns out, the gallery is another period room, this one of real historical importance, not merely a rescue from a house facing demolition.  It's a ballroom from a hotel in Alexandria, where, as I learn from the signage, George Washington celebrated his last two birthdays, Thomas Jefferson held his first inaugural banquet, and the Marquis de Lafayette was feted. I don't pace out the dimensions of the room, but I would guess it's about 50 feet long and 22 feet wide. Initially, it strikes me as rather small for a ballroom - especially if the women wore hoop skirts - but maybe I've been overly influenced by the "ballrooms" at the hotels where I've attended conferences. where "ballroom" just seems to be a shorthand term for "the largest meeting space we have in this hotel." I note the balcony from which party-goers or their hosts could look down on the goings-on.

The gallery's contents spotlight the veneration with which citizens of the young republic held George Washington both before and after his death. Along with portraits by Charles Wilson Peale, John Trumbull, and, inevitably, Gilbert Stuart (one of some 67 paintings of Washington that Stuart made) are a multitude of  objects made to honor Washington in his life or afterwards. These include an embroidered cloth made around 1810 by a 12-year-old girl in Hartford, a print made in Guangzhou for export, and a gilded bronze mantle clock made in France. The face of the clock is  topped by an American eagle with outstretched wings, and is flanked by a statuette of Washington, who looks taller and thinner than I've ever seen him depicted before. Other Washington memorabilia include a cameo embedded in the bottom of a drinking glass (akin to the ceramic frog in the bottom of a mug given as a gag?), a cloak pin, a cameo ring, and, movingly, a large silver medal commemorating the peace treaty made with an Indian tribe.

A modern work also hangs in the gallery - a "portrait" of William "Billy" Lee, Washington's enslaved valet and aide-de-camp,  in which Lee's face has been completely replaced by layers of tar. The 2016 work is by Titus Kaphar, an artist who aims to represent visually the erasure of Black individuals from early American history. Instead of being offended by yet another effort at political correctness on the museum's part, I find the work compelling and disturbing.  I wonder about the use of tar given the offensive connotations of the term "tar baby," but a quick glance at the internet indicates that the idea of a sticky figure that entraps would-be miscreants is a figure in African folklore (and, interestingly, Native American folklore as well).

Today's object is a card table made in Newport in 1786. I chose it because its simple lines and size (perhaps 36 inches long and 18" wide, though of course twice that width when the top is opened up) remind me of a small mahogany desk I have in my living room.  But the caption tells me that this table, with its fluted legs and cross-hatching along the edge of the top, was a luxury good. My desk is not.