Time Is of the Essence
Patrick Sheary, DAR Museum Curator of Furnishings and Interiors

Opened in 2018, the Study Gallery in the DAR Museum is not your typical museum gallery. It is more like an open storage area, allowing visitors a greater degree of access to the collection.  This makes it an ideal place to exhibit objects that would get “lost” in the period rooms: miniature paintings, jewelry, and other tiny things that you wouldn’t be able to see from the doorway. In this gallery you can now examine them up close and personal!

Opening drawers in the DAR Museum study gallery will reveal many wonderful and interesting objects. The objects are carefully stored in drawers and the curators have selected a wide variety of objects, ranging from the exceptional to the everyday. This method allows us to have a sampling of everything in the collection, including those sensitive objects which cannot remain on display for long. For example, textiles are easily subject to damage from light. The drawers allow the objects to stay out of the light except for those few minutes when someone is looking at the object.

Today we’ll highlight a small collection of pocket watches. Both men and women wore pocket watches. Expensive when new, prices ranged from 4 pounds for a plain silver model to 18 pounds for a gold cased version equaling approximately $300.00 to $4,400.00 in today’s money. The watches in this drawer come from many places like France, England and Switzerland. The dates vary from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the most distinctive example is the late 18th century English watch in the center (accession 1039). This is exhibited face down so the highly decorative back of enamelwork and borders of rhinestones can be seen. Others have gold cases like the Swiss watches in the top left (accession number 2879) and top right (accession number 4686) both from the early 19th century. Most of the watches here are open faced, meaning they don’t have a cover. The exception is the French watch in the lower right (accession number 3256) retailed by Baltimore, Maryland jeweler. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange is engraved on the surface. To learn more about these, please look them up in the DAR Museum collections database on our website – you can search by these accession numbers under “Go To Object”.

While you are here to see our latest exhibit, “Pleasing Truths: Power and Portraits in the American Home,” make sure to check out the Study Gallery too. You’ll discover so much more!

Can’t make it to the museum? The museum collection is searchable online from your home!

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