Poetically Posh: Richard Briggs’s Longfellow Jug and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the American Home

Title: Poetically Posh: Richard Briggs’s Longfellow Jug and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the American Home

Lecturer: Elizabeth Palms, Robert and Elizabeth Owens Curatorial Fellow, Winterthur Museum Garden and Library

Description: In the talk, she covers the origin story of the 1881 Longfellow jug and Briggs’s partnership with Wedgwood to design it, and she explores how this one ceramic jug testifies to a complex web of economic conditions and social ideologies running through the eastern United States in the latter 19th century.

Our speaker: Elizabeth graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in History from the College of William & Mary, where she also completed the NIAHD Collegiate Program in Early American History, Material Culture, and Museum Studies. In Virginia, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Intern for Works on Paper at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and worked for over two years on a team documenting, researching, and writing a book on Eyre Hall, an 18th-century home on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. She has an article and various architectural drawings in the resulting publication, The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake History. Continuing to cultivate her love of the material past, Elizabeth pursued her M.A. in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture from 2018 to 2020. She then spent two years at the Dallas Museum of Art in the Decorative Arts and Design curatorial department. During the summer of 2021, she did fieldwork as a Decorative Arts of the Gulf South Fellow with the Historic New Orleans Collection. Currently, she is back at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library as the Robert & Elizabeth Owens Curatorial Fellow.