Reference staff member Elizabeth Terry Rose, exercising both her keen eye and her artistic sensibility, offered her reflections upon seeing this photo by Samuel Kravitt highlighting Shaker design.
“Sewing table and chair caught my eye for its timeless tidiness, its dignified peace, its light. It is a Kravitt. It is a Wyeth, a Vermeer. An invitation.”
Shaker historian Edward Deming Andrews commissioned Samuel Kravitt to photograph the Shakers in the 1930s. Kravitt’s photographs showing people and objects at Hancock, Massachusetts, eloquently convey Shaker values and ways of living. The photo is one of a group of photographs and films that Samuel Kravitt’s widow, Marcia Kravitt, gave to the Library of Congress in 2004–a gift that keeps on giving in both the historical documentation and the aesthetic pleasure the materials afford viewers.
Learn more:
- View more Samuel Kravitt photographs in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
- Read about Samuel Kravitt and other materials that came in the Kravitt gift.
- Delve into groups of images of Shaker villages in the Historic American Buildings Survey.