Comments on: Exhibition Purpose

By: Susan Dunlap

Susan Dunlap — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 01:15:02 +0000

Nearly three years have passed since I saw this exhibit. Still, I can’t get it out of my mind. Of all museum exhibits I’ve seen — we’re talking the Tate, MOMA, Chicago Institute, The Louvre, the Ghetty — nothing has affected me as has this. If ever it travels, please include a Kentucky stop. If ever it is reinstalled, I want to know about it. I talk about it with everyone I meet.

Susan Dunlap
Versailles, Kentucky

By: kelsey winsor

kelsey winsor — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:53:08 +0000

great pictures!!!
i remember seeing this picture one day..

By: Paul Parish

Paul Parish — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:45:37 +0000

Miss Welty was recorded narrating her first sight of the ruins of Windsor (I’ve seen a clip on some PBS documentary); it clearly inspired awe, like one of Wordsworth’s “spots in time.” THe house is near Port Gibson (in the 1860s it was closer to hte now-disappeared river town of Rodney), and to the knowledgeable the ruins of WIndsor are faintly evoked in the ruin of a china lamp from Port Gibson that a party is sent to fetch in her novella “Delta WEdding.” This an ancestral treasure — “the Port Gibson lamp” — gets broken on the return journey and adds another laurel to the Fairchild family legend.

THe era in which Windsor was built was one that treasured the idea of a fragment or ruin — as of a Greek statue or temple — as more wonderful aesthetically than the perfect thing itself had been, and Miss Welty is evoking that Romantic attitude as well as noticing askance the folly of “climbing the family tree,” which this family does on a regular basis, and it makes them both charming and impossible. The “modern daughteryoung heroine is determined not to live like her parents.