Landmark Lecture: Wax Nostalgic: Commemorating George Washington with 18th Century Wax Miniatures

Tudor Place’s own Rob DeHart and Ianna Recco discuss one of the most unique artworks in the Tudor Place Collection: an eighteenth-century diorama of miniature wax sculptures created by New Yorker Samuel Fraunces and gifted to Martha Washington in 1783. Rob will outline its complex 10-year conservation journey. The sculpted wax figures from the tableau will be displayed for the first time in over a decade. Ianna will discuss the symbolism behind the tableau’s depiction of a scene from the ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad and its significance for colonial Americans.

Rob DeHart has served as curator at Tudor Place since 2021 facilitating the recent installation “Ancestral Spaces: People of African Descent at Tudor Place.” Previously he was a history curator at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville where he curated several award-winning exhibitions including “Let’s Eat!: Origins and Evolutions of Tennessee Food.”

Ianna Recco is the Collections Manager at Tudor Place. She received her master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art with a specialization in eighteenth-century circum-Atlantic visual culture of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. Her dissertation about an eighteenth-century British wax sculptural group of a Cherokee delegation was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art in the British Art Studies journal.