Rotherwas Room
Rotherwas Room is frequently the setting for the Mead's collection of portraits by both American and British artists. At the moment, Rotherwas Room is graced with a group of American portraits; many of these belonged to Herbert L. Pratt (Class of 1895), who assembled an extensive collection of both large-scale portraits and miniatures. These works from the colonial and federal eras convey, in their own way, the story of life in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Not only do these paintings offer a glimpse into the cultural, philosophical, and economic fabric of these times, but they provide a refreshingly personal view of some of the people who cultivated this young nation. With the meticulously rendered portraits of John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and Benjamin West, the viewer is able to see the aristocratic and elegant veneer in which the wealthy, mercantile class wished to be represented and remembered. The same assiduous attention to detail, where faces, costumes, textures, and domestic attributes are carefully articulated, is evident in the portraits of Charles Willson Peale, his son Rembrandt, and other artists such as Ralph Earl, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, and Matthew Pratt, but they have captured their sitters in a more informal and unaffected attitude. While the Mead’s remarkable collection of portraits demonstrates the initial early rapport between artists working in England and the United States, it also emphasizes that Americans increasingly sought to define their own particular identity as a people as they attained greater prosperity with the refinement and comfort that accompanies stability.
History
In the late 16th century, Sir Roger Bodenham constructed a palatial residence known as Rotherwas Court in Herefordshire, England. Around 1611, he commissioned the walnut paneling and oak chimney piece for the dining room. The fireplace mantel could be the work of Maximilian Colt, a Flemish émigré who was working at nearby Hatfield House around this time. The mantel displays the twenty-five coats of arms of the Bodenham family, as well as female personifications of the four cardinal virtues: Justice, Temperance, Prudence, and Fortitude. The costumes of these figures combine features of classical antiquity, reflecting Renaissance taste and the late Middle Ages in their armor and warrior-like stance.
When Rotherwas Court was dismantled and auctioned in 1913, Herbert L. Pratt (Class of 1895) purchased the room for his neo-Jacobean mansion "The Braes," then under construction in Glen Cove, New York. Upon Pratt’s death in 1945, his bequest to Amherst College included Rotherwas Room and over eighty American portraits and miniatures, as well as an extensive collection of decorative arts. Rotherwas Room was incorporated into the Mead Art Museum when the Museum was built in 1949.