“Quaint and Grotesque”: Library Furniture from Wodenethe in the Renaissance Style 

Little is left of Beacon’s Wodenethe, conceived by its owner Henry Winthrop Sargent as one of the finest American gardens and estates of the nineteenth century. In this presentation, Steven Baltsas, Lois F. McNeil Fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, explores the meaning of carved oak seating furniture and bookcases made for the library at Wodenethe in the 1840s. Baltsas reveals the origins of this furniture in “le style Renaissance” and explores how it relates to Sargent’s fascination with his Massachusetts ancestry, high culture, and landscape gardening.