The Sauceboat, From Specimen to Relic

This project is a response to the curatorial crisis that focuses on expanding the museum collection’s scale yet neglects the archaeological collection’s life after it has arrived at the museum. Building upon the thesis and method of “object biography,” it focuses on a silver sauceboat in the collection of the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin and Marshall College. The paper’s trajectory follows two main avenues of investigation that study items and their related historical and cultural crises. This article first conducts provenance research on the sauceboat and further explores the potential of object biography as a narrative in curating “bulk” collections at museums. This article argues that a close examination of an artifact’s lifetime story/provenance aids art historians and museum professionals in using material objects to present the “past.” It concludes with a proposal to display the sauceboat within a contextual museum setting and an exploration of the value of practicing object biographies to contextualize the use of images/visuals/material objects to reinterpret cultural artifacts.