“Orchestrating Elegance”—an exhibit of Gilded Age designer Lawrence Alma-Tadema

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts currently has an exhibit on the work of noted European painter turned Gilded Age designer in the United States. Alma-Tadema was born in 1836 a Dutch citizen who spent much of his life in England. In 1884, industrialist Henry Gurdon Marquand hired Alma-Tadema to design a music room for Marquand’s mansion under construction on Madison Avenue in New York City. Marquand died in 1902 and his family sold the collections; the mansion was torn down in 1912, but now many of the elaborate items have been reassembled in this exhibit, which is on view until September 4, 2017. (Photo of Marquand’s mansion, undated, is in the public domain).

Read

A Piano that Survived the Wrecking Ball Now a Time Machine to NY’s Gilded Age

By David D’Arcy

Observer

July 3, 2017