The Inside Story

In 2014, the Taft Museum of Art accepted a  remarkable gift of 89 pieces of Chinese painted  enamel copperware. The late Reverend Compton  Allyn left these rare treasures to the Museum in his  will. Made by painting colorful diluted glass paste  onto copper forms, the enamels in Reverend Allyn’s collection illuminate a story of cultural exchange between East and West.

The special exhibition A Splendid Century: Cincinnati Art 1820–1920 highlights the impact made on art in the city by the former residents of the Taft Museum of Art’s historic house. Charles and Anna Taft were the last of these residents. In 1900, after Anna inherited her father David Sinton’s $20 million estate (over $500 million today), the Tafts became philanthropists and art collectors who made a lasting mark on visual art in the Queen City.

By the 1840s, artists had begun coming to Cincinnati from the surrounding region to learn more about art, as well as to exhibit and to sell their work, and many born in the city enjoyed success. In 1840, a writer for the New York Star asked, “Cincinnati! What is there in the atmosphere of Cincinnati, that has so thoroughly awakened the arts of sculpture and painting?

This 18th-century notice poses a slew of tantalizing questions. First,  was this the same Porter Clay who made the Taft Museum of Art’s  early Kentucky sideboard? If so, where did Clay run off to? Was he captured? When did he come back to Lexington? Finally, did he avoid a jail sentence, and, if so, how? Such questions abound in an intriguing story featuring a runaway furniture maker, spiked with notes of nepotism and Kentucky luxury.

When an art object is going to be photographed for publication, it needs to look its best. One of the Taft’s treasures, the splendid but badly tarnished 17th-century Two-Handled Covered Cup, was brought to the Museum’s conservation lab to be cleaned and stabilized prior to photography (The Taft has a lab on site for the use of different contract conservators, each of whom specializes in certain kinds of art objects.)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This illustrated “modernized fairy tale” for children stars Dorothy, a farm girl from Kansas. Swept away in a cyclone to the fantastical land of Oz, she and her dog Toto encounter munchkins, witches, and flying monkeys. Along with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, Dorothy travels  the yellow brick road to see the Wizard—who ultimately  turns out to be a fraud from Omaha—and inadvertently  slays the Wicked Witch of the West with a bucket of water.

Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott, which document Paris and New York amid change,  provide a glimpse of what has been lost and what remains of Cincinnati’s ever-changing landscape.