Gallery Talk, Turning Night into Day: Lighting in Colonial America

Before the advent of reliable electricity, efforts to strategically enhance and reflect firelight were time-consuming, precarious, and often expensive. To extend light from the source to the far corners of a room, the colonists and early 19th-century Americans invested in lamps, candlesticks, snuffers, pewter and silver objects with reflective surfaces, looking glasses, and furniture with metallic finishes. Caryne Eskridge, the Marcia Brady Tucker Fellow in the Department of American Decorative Arts, examines selected objects in the American decorative arts collection and explores the challenges and intricacies of light in colonial America.