The Inside Story

At the turn of the 20th century, few art collectors in Cincinnati shared the passion and determination of Charles Phelps Taft and Anna Sinton Taft.

As it turns out, Cincinnati was one of the largest manufacturers of boots and shoes in the United States for much of the early 1900s. Factories in Boston, Lynn, and Haverhill, Massachusetts were the main centers of production, but they could not compete with Cincinnati.

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?

A slew of tantalizing questions surround this 18th Century furniture maker. 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, and the following year he began adapting the book as a musical for adults. The show premiered in Chicago  in 1902, became a smash hit, opened on Broadway, and then toured until 1909. The Wizard of Oz opened in Cincinnati at the Grand Opera House on New Year’s Day, 1905.

The sketches Turner made during his journeys throughout the United Kingdom and Europe informed his watercolors, which often feature accurate portrayals of specific places he visited.

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.