Reinstalling Mrs. Ward's Corner Cupboard

Abstract

This essay uses the Artemas Ward House, which was given to Harvard University in 1925 as a "Public Patriotic Museum," as a case study to examine a popular colonial revival strategy of display—the colonial corner cupboard. In the early twentieth century corner cupboards were symbols of memory keeping. As both historic artifacts and a way of viewing historic artifacts, they served to naturalize the objects displayed inside of them as authentic and antique. The corner cupboard historicized the house museum by suggesting that elegant objects on display were always part of the colonial interior. The Ward House contained an eighteenth-century cupboard that was reinvented in the twentieth century to present a specific version of the house's past, offering an imagined material story about the Ward family's history and objects. Analysis of the Ward corner cupboard highlights the connection between display practice and narrative in colonial revival house museums.