Previous Exhibits

Family Trees: Generations of Storytelling
November 22, 2003 - January 4, 2004

~ Fanciful trees decorated with inspiration from children’s books ~

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Degrees of Latitude:
Maps of America from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection

July 10 - October 19, 2003

Americae Sive Novi Orbis by Abraham Ortelius, Antwerp, 1592, black-and-white line engraving with period color (1986-81). The body of water, or inlet, depicted directly below Apalchen and above Wingan Dekoa is the first illustration of the Chesapeake Bay on a printed map. ©2002 The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

The Concord Museum is pleased to announce that Degrees of Latitude: Maps of America from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection will be on exhibit at the Museum in historic Concord from July 10 - October 19, 2003, in the only New England venue. The exhibition is sponsored by State Street Corporation.

The exhibition, organized by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, uses maps as a point of departure for understanding the history of American settlement and colonization.  These 72 extraordinary historic maps and an atlas of early America were selected for their rarity, historical importance and aesthetic beauty.

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Emerson and His Study: An Inside Look

January 25-April 6, 2003

View of Emerson's study, by Florence Todd, 1877,
courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Associaton

As part of the year-long recognition of the bicentennial of the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) with activities planned in Boston, Cambridge and Concord, the Concord Museum is pleased to announce a new exhibition that will give visitors a privileged, inside look at an icon of American letters that is perhaps without parallel – the Study of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoyed an international reputation in his lifetime as the leading light among American intellectuals. The thinkers that he gathered around him in Concord made that small town the center of the Transcendentalist movement in the 1840s; generations of travelers and students subsequently made a special pilgrimage to visit the always-welcoming “sage of Concord.” The center of this activity in Emerson’s home was the Study.  He worked there and entertained a steady stream of visitors – American and foreign, famous and infamous, and obscure – for forty years. Children especially were given a warm welcome, a tour of favorite paintings and sculpture and a pencil and paper for drawing. 

Good Then, Good Always: Toys and Memories
A New Exhibition at the Concord Museum      
October 4, 2002 – January 5, 2003

In celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of The Toy Shop of Concord, the oldest independent specialty toy store in the country, the Concord Museum in historic Concord, Massachusetts is pleased to present a new exhibition, Good Then, Good Always: Toys and Memories. 

                                             Illustrating Little Women:
                            Louisa May Alcott and Frank Thayer Merrill

                    A New Exhibition at the Concord Museum
                                     June 21 – September 15, 2002

                                                     In Alcott’s hand:  “Good”
          Courtesy Concord Free Public Library, Special Collections

                                              
                                                              “Please give these to your mother.”
                                                      In Alcott’s hand:  “Laurie looks very much older here than in other pictures. 
                                                                        About right here and rather too young elsewhere.”
                                                                    Courtesy Concord Free Public Library, Special Collections

“The drawings are all capital, and we had great fun over them…”
                                                               July 20, 1880, Louisa May Alcott to her publisher Thomas Niles
on Frank T. Merrill’s illustrations for the 1880 edition of Little Women.

Traditions in Elegance: 
100 Teapots from the Norwich Castle Museum

January 25, 2002 - May 27, 2002

Traditions in Elegance: 100 Teapots from the Norwich Castle Museum is an exhibition which explores the custom of tea preparation and tea drinking in English life through its most prominent artifact – the teapot.  The teapots selected for this exhibition are 100 of the finest 18^th and early 19^th century examples from the 3,000 in the Norwich Castle Museum’s acclaimed Twining Teapot Gallery in Norwich, England. 

This exhibition was organized by the Norfolk Museums Service, R. Twining and Company Ltd. and The Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey.  It is made possible through the generous support of Twinings.  The presentation at the Concord Museum is made possible by R. Twining and Company Ltd., Northeast Auctions, and Wayne Pratt, Inc.

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Agate teapot, probably Staffordshire, c. 1740-50.  The teapot features applied agate decoration and a lion finial.  Photograph courtesy of Norfolk Museum Services. 

Teapots are on view at the Concord Museum in Concord, Massachusetts as part of the exhibition, Traditions in Elegance: 100 Teapots from the Norwich Castle Museum, January 25 through May 27, 2002.

Wild Flora

October 4, 2001 - January 6, 2002

Wild Flora, the newest exhibition at the Concord Museum, opens October 4,
2001 with over one hundred prints of pressed plants artfully preserved using an innovative 21^st-century technique, as well as botanical specimens collected in the traditional manner in the 19^th century by Henry Thoreau and other pioneering New England naturalists.  

Field biologist and naturalist Erika Sonder has reinvented the centuries-old tradition of collecting and preserving plant specimens in a herbarium.  Herbaria are collections of pressed, dried, mounted and labeled plant specimens that are kept in systematic order and used by researchers to further our understanding of the plant world.  Sonder’s “Portable Herbarium” is a collection of New England botanical specimens that she gathers, prepares, and then reproduces by means of high-tech laser copying.  The full-size, true-to-color reproductions are amazingly three-dimensional and visually indistinguishable from actual herbarium specimens. Almost all botanical features necessary for identification are easily seen. Sonder is the assistant curator of vascular plants for the New England Botanical Club and her work has been exhibited at the Boston Museum of Science, the New England Wild Flower Society, Harvard University Herbaria and Tower Hill Botanic Garden.

In Wild Flora, Sonder’s 21^st-century herbarium specimens are exhibited alongside examples of those collected in the 19^th century. Botanists—both dedicated amateur and trained professional, from Boston and Cambridge as well as Concord—have been gathering specimens in the varied habitats of Concord for over one hundred and fifty years.  Brothers Charles and Edward Jarvis were two of the earliest collectors. Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1862), whose journals are filled with observations and commentary on the wild plants of Concord, created a herbarium of more than 900 botanical specimens – one of the region’s larger collections at the time. Thoreau’s sister Sophia, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, Edward Sherman Hoar, Horace Mann, Jr., Minot Pratt, Walter Deane, Alfred W. Hosmer, Emile Francis Williams, and, more recently, Richard Jefferson Eaton and Ray Angelo, all added to the botanical record of Concord’s wild flora. 

Arisaema trifolium seed stalks, Jack-in-the-pulpit, © 1998 Erika Sonder

Exhibited are:

•  a copy of Jacob Bigelow’s 1824 edition of Florula Bostoniensis, owned by Edward Jarvis (1803-1864) with his own entries written in ink and pencil, noting the date and the place of his sightings.

•  a rare specimen of Lygodium palmatum or climbing fern, collected by Henry Thoreau, his copy of Wilson’s Ornithology that he used to press the specimens, and his walking stick which he notched to measure specimens while in the field.

•  a collecting box and specimens gathered by Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (1793-1867). Ripley, a contemporary of Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and the Alcotts, was a self-educated classical scholar who was well-versed in languages and the sciences.  She lived in the Old Manse in Concord and was acknowledged by Dr. Asa Gray of Harvard, author of the standard botanical manual for the northeastern United States, as “…the best botanist in the country round.” 

a scrapbook made by Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, of “Some pressed leaves saved by The Little Women of the family.”  

Adiantum pedatum, Maidenhair Fern, © 1998 Erika Sonder

Specially-designed, hands-on activities accompany the exhibition and engage visitors of all ages. The exhibition continues through January 6, 2002 with a complete calendar of programs for adults and children.

Everything Old is New Again:
Recent Acquisitions at the Concord Museum

June 23, 2001 – September 16, 2001

On exhibition at the Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts Everything Old is New Again: Recent Acquisitions at the Concord Museum, June 23, 2001 – September 16, 2001

Thanks to a resourceful curator (and of course, to the Museum’s exceedingly generous donors) it is possible to encounter new works of the highest quality every time one visits the Concord Museum.  This summer’s special exhibition, Everything Old is New Again, offers a unique opportunity to enjoy a broad spectrum of recently acquired historic artifacts—from a bass drum and music used by the Concord Junction Brass Band in the early 1900s to an elegant 1812 silk needlework made by a Concord schoolgirl—and to have a rare glimpse into the collecting practices of one of the oldest and most distinguished history and decorative arts museums in the country.

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Extending the View: Photographs by Richard Cheek of Conserved Landscapes of Massachusetts

February 8, 2001 – June 10, 2001

A resident of Belmont, photographer Richard Cheek has devoted his career to recording the visual history of American architecture and landscape design and is one of the most widely published photographers in New England.  His photographs are well known to a variety of audiences for their ability to both describe and celebrate the subject, whether it be a piece of 18^th-century New England furniture or a frozen winter vista.  Extending the View offers a rare opportunity to see his work in a gallery setting and includes additional photographs not reproduced in Land of the Commonwealth.  Richard Cheek’s photographs of conserved landscapes “represent, in a highly aesthetic way, the hidden worlds of processes, connections, and consequences that, in violated landscapes, are lost. …

The Back Bay Fens, viewed through the arch of the Boylston Street Bridge
© Richard Cheek

Each of these seemingly perfect landscapes, whether designed by a landscape architect, cultivated by a farmer, managed by a forester, or left to its own natural devices, is a real place literally crawling and sprouting with life.” (Robert E. Cook, Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, in the introduction to Land of the Commonwealth.)    

For America's 19^th-century Transcendentalist philosophers, particularly Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, landscape was the expression of Nature itself; it is in landscape that the individual is able to perceive the spiritual aspect of existence.   Emerson wrote in his journal: “Every natural form to the smallest, a leaf, a sunbeam, a moment of time, a drop, is related to the whole, and partakes of the beauty of the whole.”  Thoreau in particular is given credit by historians for his unique ability to perceive the landscape both as a picture and as a

process; that landscape could be looked at “with the eye of an artist” and also recognized as “a body [that] has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit…”  

The work of Thoreau and Emerson continues to inspire 21^st-century efforts to conserve landscape.  Today, Massachusetts has 1.1 million acres of land permanently protected from development—over one-fifth of the state.  This record is extraordinary in light of the fact that Massachusetts is the sixth smallest state in area, but the thirteenth most populous.  Few other urbanized states can boast a higher percentage of their area under protection.  The custodians and promoters of this remarkable legacy of conservation include town and city governments, state and federal agencies, nonprofit organizations like The Trustees of Reservations, private institutions, and generous landowners.  The exhibition, Extending the View, like the companion book, Land of the Commonwealth, is a timely call to renew these commitments to conservation for the benefit of generations to come.

Keeping Time: Clockmaking in Concord, 1790 - 1835

September 8, 2000 - January 21, 2001

Movement of the timepiece inscribed by Daniel Munroe Jr. (1775-1859), Concord or Boston, 1805-1810.  Concord Museum, Concord, Massachusetts; Anonymous gift. Photograph by David Bohl.  © Concord Museum.

Treasures from the Boston Athenæum Fine Arts Collection

January 20 - August 13, 2000

The Concord Grape: An American Classic

June 25 - November 7, 1999

• Like apple pie and the Thanksgiving turkey, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is universally recognized and taken for granted. How remarkable, then, to see the point of sale advertising from the 1940s introducing this combination as a novel idea.

• Celebrity endorsements and linkage to popular entertainment are now familiar marketing strategies, and Welch’s developed some of the most successful with their associations with The Irene Rich Show, one of the most popular shows in the early days of radio, and with the pioneering television show Howdy Doody.

• A humble but effective giveaway, the jelly jar glass has now achieved pop icon status. The Welch’s collection includes all the familiar examples from their long (and continuing) series of decorated jars, including Howdy Doody and the Flintstones.

The exhibition begins with Ephraim Bull, developer of the Concord grape, and includes photographs, broadsides, and items associated with Bull and his initial efforts to sell Concord grape vines.

Photographs beginning with the period 1895 to 1910 through the 1960s document, decade by decade, Welch’s trade exhibitions, grocery store displays, and other promotions.

Some of the rarest and most visually exciting pieces in the exhibit are the point-of-sale materials. Produced for grocery stores and soda fountains to appeal directly to the consumer, these signs, stand-ups, and banners were made to be used and discarded. The variety and impact of these items, most in perfect condition, convey visually the changing strategies on the part of the company and changing expectations on the part of the customer. The change in the color palette alone conveys a sense of the time period represented.

Also included in the exhibit are examples of beautifully designed and printed trolley car cards from the 1910s and ‘20s, recipe books from the 1940s addressing the war-time sugar shortage, and audiovisual clips of Welch’s television advertising from the 1950s.

The Welch’s collection ably illustrates the marketing of Concord’s own grape, which is in itself an interesting chapter in the history of marketing and American pop culture. A gallery talk on June 25th at 10:00 a.m. by Museum curator, David Wood, will look at the early development of the grape by Concordian Ephraim Bull, set against the background of the Welch’s collection. Additional associated programs will be scheduled throughout the run of the exhibit. The Concord Grape: An American Classic is on exhibit through November 7, 1999.

George Washington: Profile of a Patriot

March 12, 1999 through June 6, 1999

Washington Taking Command of the American Army

Published by Currier & Ives, New York, 1876.  Gift of Mrs. Douglas Seaman, Association Vice Regent for Wisconsin, and Mr. Seaman.

In June 1775, Washington was selected by the Continental Congress to be Commander-In-Chief of the Continental Army.  Before leaving Philadelphia for Boston to take command of the troops, he wrote his wife at Mount Vernon, "I return an unalterable affection for you which neither time nor distance can change...."

By the middle decades of the nineteenth-century, there was an explosion in the number of American history engravings and etchings, such as that in Emerson's Concord dining room, much of it portraying George Washington as the great American Hero.  This Hero, however, was shown not only as a great general and wise statesman, but as a dutiful schoolboy, a vigorous horseback rider, a host to numerous guests at Mount Vernon, a devoted family man, and as an energetic and innovative farmer. The charming and colorful artwork of the nineteenth century captures the nuances of the man as well as the dawning of a new age. 

This exhibition was funded in part by the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and Lucent Technologies.

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