and so this is also robert peckham who is going to be part of this. this really brackets winthrop chandler and robert peckham of westminster, the beginning and end of this century-long study that i've completed. when i was visiting the benington museum a few summers ago i not only made the acquaintance of james wilson, first american commercial globemaker but i discovered the unique power of objects to tell a story that's not available to us from the textural record. to be honest, i had come to the museum really -- although i said i came to look at objects i came to look at the cure torial files, looking at text, which i was much more comfortable with. an exhibit on vermont furniture in the early republic. but as i wandered through the sunlit main gallery where the museum's treasured objects were displayed, i started to see things that helped me understand how artisans and consumers -- and those are really the two groups -- imagined their world. first my eye was struck by a large neoclassical sideboard that you see here with this -- oops. with this gr

so again he finds that and then robert peckham or someone like erastus fields who uses daguerreotypes for his portraits. you don't have to sit for the portrait, he'll take the family in a series of daguerreotype. and he'll paint from the daguerreotype. unlike the moore family, this is far more solid, far more boring and much of the exuberance and vitality of the earlier has been diminished by that particular mode. and then you get really an interesting story with daguerreotypes because you get the same process of itinerants who go out with urban training and move into the provincial areas looking for a wider, more diffused market but you get entrepreneurs like hawes and brady which try to crowd out what they call the cheap ones who are really making what they consider to be these flat portraits. but my argument, what i leave you with, i'm not so sure they're cheap. this is a plain portrait, quite similar in its mode to those earlier folk portraits. many folks in the 1840s would have wanted their portrait to look like those earlier painted portraits, one that has sort of a more direct