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Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom
A History
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Publisher:
2016
Summary
Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History addresses the phenomenon of historic houses as a distinct species of museum. Everyone understands the special nature of an art museum, a national museum, or a science museum, but “house museum” nearly always requires clarification. In the United States the term is almost synonymous with historic preservation; in the United Kingdom, it is simply unfamiliar, the very idea being conflated with stately homes and the National Trust.
By analyzing the motivation of the founders, and subsequent keepers, of house museums, Linda Young identifies a typology that casts light on what house museums were intended to represent and their significance (or lack thereof) today. This book examines:
• heroes’ houses: once inhabited by great persons (e.g., Shakespeare’s birthplace, Washington’s Mount Vernon);
• artwork houses: national identity as specially visible in house design, style, and technique (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Modernist houses);
• collectors’ houses: a microcosm of collecting in situ domesticu, subsequently presented to the nation as the exemplars of taste (e.g., Sir John Soane’s Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum);
• English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained thanks to primogeniture but threatened with redundancy and rescued as museums to be touted as the peak of English national culture; English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained for centuries thanks to primogeniture but threatened by redundancy and strangely rescued as museums, now touted as the peak of English national culture;
• Everyman/woman’s social history houses: the modern, demotic response to elite houses, presented as social history but tinged with generic ancestor veneration (e.g., tenement house museums in Glasgow and New York).
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2016
ISBN-Print
978-1-4422-3976-0
ISBN-Online
978-1-4422-3977-7
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
300
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Preface No access
Acknowledgments No access
Ch01. Is There a Museum in the House? No access Pages 1 - 30
Ch02. Heroes’ Houses No access Pages 31 - 58
Ch03. Heroes’ Houses No access Pages 59 - 86
Ch04. Artwork Houses and National Aesthetics No access Pages 87 - 114
Ch05. Collectors’ Houses No access Pages 115 - 144
Ch06. Social History House Museums No access Pages 145 - 174
Ch07. Authenticity No access Pages 175 - 204
Ch08. The English Country House No access Pages 205 - 236
Ch09. The Significance, Insignificance, and Future of House Museums No access Pages 237 - 260
