Taste of the Month

The culmination of the celebration of the Boston Athenæum’s Bicentennial in 2007 was the large retrospective exhibition entitled Acquired Tastes: 200 Years of Collecting for the Boston Athenæum.The exhibition emphasized the extensive and diverse collections that had been carefully formed by the Athenæum during its first two centuries. The comprehensive nature of the exhibition, which included paintings, sculptures, maps, prints, photographs, manuscripts, and decorative arts, required that most the Athenæum's first floor be temporarily converted into exhibition space. "Taste of the Month" reprints entries from the richly illustrated, scholarly book that was published on the occassion of Acquired Tastes and gives readers an opportunity to review some of the items that were in that exhibition. These objects have been chosen to represent the best and, sometimes, most unusual items that, together, make the Boston Athenæum a special place. 

Egyptian Decorative Shrine Hanging	Golden Age	Demosthenes and Sophocles	Venus de' Medici
A View of Part of the Town of Boston	Letter Pouch and Chalice Veil, Italian	Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis, cum calendario, Books of Hours	The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
Liber chronicarum, Nuremberg, 1493	The Bloody Massacre	Cloisonné, Chinese, Qianlong Era	Judith with the Head of Holofernes, n.d.
Apollo Belvedere	Boston, 1828	Historic Weapons, Lawrence Collection	Primus Liber [Septum librorum] Viginti missarum, 1532
Giovanni Paolo Panini, "Interior of St. Peter's, Rome," 1756-1757	Busts of Franklin and Lafayette by Jean-Antoine Houdon	View of the Town of Gloucester, Mass., 1835-1836, by Fitz Henry Lane	Armed Lodestone, European, mid-18th century
Iniunccions Geven by the Moste Excellent Prince, Edward the Sixte and Tractatio de sacramento eucharistiae	Francis William Pitt Greenwood, 1840	John Adams, 1788	John Adams, 1818, by John B. Binon
Medal of Simon Bolivar, 1825.	Bible. Old Testament. Pslams. Hebrew. [Psalter]	John Adams, ca. 1815, by Gilbert Stuart	Venus Victrix and The Judgment of Paris, Horatio Greenough
Dorothea Lynde Dix, 1845	Cast of the Portland Vase, ca. 1782	Uranometria	Kamehameha the Great, King of the Sandwich Islands, ca. 1816
Shobal Vail Clevenger, Sculptor	View of Boston in 1848. From East Boston, 1848	Stained Glass, by Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman	Habiti d'huomeni et donne venetiane
James Perkins, 1822 by Gilbert Stuart	Little Nell	Henry Winthrop Sargent and His Family, by John Adams Whipple	A New Light of Alchymie, by Michał Sędziwój, 1650
By the President of the United States: A Proclamation [Emancipation Proclamation].	Hannah Adams, by Chester Harding, 1827	Will o' Wisp, by Harriet Hosmer	Edward Clarke Cabot
“Testament and Psalter, Sternhold’s Version of the Psalms." Manuscript, hand-written by Walter Buchanan (fl. 1650s [London]: 1653)