VIRTUAL TOUR: Up Close: Carvings and Quandaries

Join Boston Athenaeum docent Carolyn Hilles-Pilant for an exploration of the life and work of Horatio Greenough and Thomas Crawford, two American Neoclassical sculptors who expatriated to Italy in the early nineteenth century despite quarantines and other misadventures. The politics and popular aesthetics of their day provide a context for understanding the importance of these artists to their time, as well as ours. The tour will spotlight three sculptures in the Athenaeum's collections: Venus Vitrix and Judgement of Paris by Greenough and Adam and Eve by Crawford.

 

Carolyn Hilles-Pilant is a longtime BA member who became a docent after retiring from an academic career that included teaching, college counseling, and being a library director. Researching the works in the BA's collections pulls together her background in history and her experience of the art and culture she enjoyed while living and working in six countries. In her tours, she aims to entertain and engage with others as well as inform—a combination she learned to value in her decades of teaching.