Intersections: Scriptures, Prints, and Paintings in Antebellum America

A Symposium

Sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia
and the Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Monday, May 2, 2005

9 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

held at the Library Company of Philadelphia,
1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107

and presented in conjunction with the exhibition
"Intersections: Scriptures, Prints, and Paintings
in Antebellum America"
Carol Soltis, Guest Curator
Exhibition on view through July 22, 2005

Sally M. Promey (Professor of American Art History, University of
Maryland), Mirror Images: Framing the Self in Early New England Material
Practice. Prof. Promey will discuss the use of pictures in the Puritan
devotional practice of self-examination.

James Green (Librarian, Library Company of Philadelphia), The American
Bible Illustrated. He will discuss six large bible ventures between 1788
and 1846 and will focus on American bible illustration in the context of
developing printing technologies and publishing enterprises.

David Morgan (Duesenberg Professor of Christianity and the Arts, Valparaiso
University), From Bibles to Flags: 19th-Century American Sacred Imagery of
Nationhood. This talk examines the importance of the bible for national
formation in public schools focusing on graphics in school books, tracts,
and related imagery. He will explore the place of the bible in American
life and its eventual replacement by the national flag when the courts
determined shortly after the Civil War that bibles could not be used as
textbooks.

Carol E. Soltis (Consulting Curator, Center for American Art, Philadelphia
Museum of Art), Jefferson's Art Collection: Democracy and 'The Lessons of
Religion'. Thomas Jefferson was a major proponent of religious freedom and
his religious speculations led him to create his own bible. This talk will
identify and illustrate the paintings of religious subject matter in the
President's collection at Monticello, explore the various reasons for their
acquisition and retention by Jefferson, and discuss their relationship to
his bible and political perspective.

Mark Schantz (Associate Professor of History, Hendrix College), Mortality
and Morality: The Court of Death in American Antebellum American Culture.
Prof. Schantz will situate Rembrandt Peale's successful exhibition picture,
The Court of Death, in the wider antebellum world of imaginings on death --
particularly in dialogue with the varieties of memorial lithography
(Currier & Ives, etc.) and post-mortem photography.

Guy Jordan (Ph.D. candidate in Art History, University of Maryland),
Looking Down the Road to Ruin in the 1840s. This paper situates the
consumption of images in the 1840s within the visual culture of moral
reform, arguing that the cultural construction of vision during this decade
was fundamentally affected by intersections between serial narratives,
reform physiology, and religious revivalism.

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Please RSVP to Kate Norton at (215) 546-3181 or email
knortonlibrarycompany.org.