Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories - Hardcover

by David Park Curry (Author), Martha R. Severens (Author), Allison Perkins (Foreword by)

Reynolda: Her Muses, Her Stories is your invitation to explore Reynolda House Museum of American Art, North Carolina's nationally acclaimed art museum showcasing paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts in the restored 1917 home of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds and his wife, Katharine. Their sixty-four-room bungalow sits at the center of an estate that beckons thousands of visitors each year to its formal gardens, meadows, woodlands, shops, and restaurants.

In this volume, David Park Curry has captured the essence of Reynolda House Museum of American Art through a lavishly illustrated essay that blends Reynolda's fifty years as a beloved family home with her second life as a museum of American art. Using the lenses of time, landscape, home, social context, history, and memory, Curry connects you to the remarkable place called Reynolda. Highlighting the fascinating--and often surprising--stories of the myriad ways signature works of art came into this stellar collection, Martha R. Severns offers insights about the artists, writers, donors, and, most importantly, the museum's founder, Barbara Babcock Millhouse. Each of the eighty concise essays is afforded a generous two-page layout that includes a full-page color image.

This beautifully illustrated book takes you through an American place and an American collection. Consider it your personal tour with behind-the-scenes access to all the stories you might wish to learn, but cannot, in the limited span of a single visit to this Museum.

Author Biography

Dr. David Park Curry, formerly the senior curator of Decorative Arts, American Painting & Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, specializes in American and European art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Curry holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University. He has lectured widely in the United States and England, and published studies on Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, American Impressionism and Realism, folk art, Victorian architecture, world fairs, and period framing.

Martha R. Severns is a graduate of Wells College in Aurora, New York, and holds a master's degree from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She has served as curator at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina; the Portland Museum of Art in Maine; and the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina. She is the author of Andrew Wyeth: America's Painter; Greenville County Museum of Art: The Southern Collection; The Charleston Renaissance; From New York to Nebo: The Artistic Journey of Eugene Thomason and co-author most recently of Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from The Johnson Collection.