October 2- 8, 2003
mixpicks
Open House
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Meeting your maker was never meant to be this fun: The Wagner Institute, a perfectly preserved Victorian natural history museum and one of the city's pre-eminent institutions, has recently acquired a color portrait of its founder, William Wagner, and is preparing to reveal it to the public. Completed by artist Thomas Sully in 1836, it depicts Wagner in his youth, around the time he was searching for and amassing his collections: fossils, minerals and animals (including a saber-toothed tiger, the first ever found). But the unveiling this Saturday as part of an all-day open house focuses with typical breadth on the painting's artist as much as its subject. Sully is viewed by many as a great documentarian of Philadelphia in the early 1800s, and Michael J. Lewis, chairman of the art department at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., will lay out Sully's perspective of our city during the day's keynote lecture. Sully is, he argues, a painter in the Romantic style who happened to have flourished in Philadelphia's orderly, Quaker environment -- and the Wagner Institute's legacy is as much a continuation of that outlook as it is of William Wagner's interests.
Open House, Sat., Oct. 4, noon-4 p.m., 3 p.m. lecture, free; 4 p.m. reception, $30; Wagner Free Institute of Science, Montgomery Ave. and 17th St., 215-763-6529.
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