A Suite for Piano: Alma Tadema and the Marquand Music Room
A lecture by Dr. Kathleen Morris

In 1884, the celebrated Victorian painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema designed the interior of a Greco-Pompeian-style music room for American millionaire Henry Gurdon Marquand’s Madison Avenue mansion. The finished room and its extraordinary suite of furniture and textiles drew extensive attention and commentary on both sides of the Atlantic. The evocative interior was to be short lived, however, as its contents were dispersed at public sale following Marquand’s death in 1902. In subsequent years, the contents of the room were widely scattered. In her role as the decorative arts curator at the Clark Art Institute, Kathleen Morris spent ten years researching and preparing the exhibition Orchestrating Elegance: Alma-Tadema and Design, which recently concluded a highly successful presentation at the Clark. She will present an overview of the project, including tracking down the contents of the room, conservation projects related to the textiles and inlaid furniture, and discoveries made while researching and writing the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition.

Kathleen Morris holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Virginia. She is the Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Decorative Arts at the
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown MA.

A reception will be held before the lecture at 6:00 p.m., with the lecture starting promptly at 6:45 p.m.
Lectures are partially sponsored by generous gifts from Christopher Broadwell and Lewis I. Haber