Sarah Mead Leonard
@smeadleonard.bsky.social
1.6K followers 880 following 300 posts
Art historian and public historian. PhD. #MaterialCulture and #HistoricLandscapes, that kind of thing. Also running @morris-on-screen.bsky.social
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smeadleonard.bsky.social
Hello all, it’s so exciting to see so many new and familiar people popping up here! For new followers, I’m an art historian and museum professional with a focus on c.1850s-1910s British decorative art, fine art, and physical landscapes.
And I have a very good cat named Thistle, that’s important too.
A selfie of a person and a cat looking very seriously into the camera. The person has short brown hair, round blue glasses, and a dark floral shirt. The cat is supremely grey and fluffy.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
Reminder that this is tomorrow - putting together the presentation now, and excited to be talking about Morris and the Thames again!
smeadleonard.bsky.social
I'm excited to say I'm taking part in the Totally Thames Festival 2025, presenting "William Morris's Thames: Inspiration and Resource" for the William Morris Society UK.

The talk will take place online on Wednesday, September 24th, 6-7pm London time.

thamesfestivaltrust.org/whats-on/wil...
Thames Festival Trust - William Morris's Thames: Inspiration and Resource @ Totally Thames 2025 - Thames Festival Trust
An illustrated lecture exploring William Morris's relationship with the River Thames through his beautiful patterns.
thamesfestivaltrust.org
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
merryrobin.bsky.social
A thread of Inuit art that you didn't know you needed, starting with one of my favourites
🧵
merryrobin.bsky.social
Sheouak Petaulassie was an Inuk artist.
Her art can be found at the National Gallery of Canada, Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Glenbow Museum, the Hood Museum of Art, the UBC Museum of Anthropology, the U. of Michigan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, & the Art Gallery of Windsor.
"Sheouak Petaulassie drawing beside her child in a tent, Cape Dorset, Nunavut", photo by Rosemary Gilliat. She is seated at a table, wearing a traditional Inuit outfit trimmed with fur. She is holding a pencil, looking at the camera mid-drawing, as if just interrupted. Her child is playing next to the table, but we can only see a little bit of them. There is a sewing machine behind her, it looks like a creative environment. An elegant stencil print titled "Three Walrus" by Sheouak Petaulassie, 1960. It features three abstracted walruses set against a plain white background. They are depicted in a minimalistic way that captures a lively social moment between them. Half of their bodies is submerged in water.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
Excited that my work with @morris-on-screen.bsky.social gets a mention here!
economist.com
Even if you know nothing about William Morris, you will recognise his work. But the prevalence of his prints is ironic, given his principles
The ironic ubiquity of William Morris’s prints
An exhibition and a new collection point to his enduring appeal
econ.st
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
morris-on-screen.bsky.social
Fiddler on the Roof, 1971

William Morris, "Chrysanthemum", 1877
A scene from Fiddler on the Roof (1971): Tevye enters a room, following a woman. The room is decorated in Victorian style, with brass table lamps and objects, a sofa upholstered in a dark floral with a lace cover on the back, dark curtains, and Morris & Co. "Chrysanthemum" on the wall. All of the colors are very muted.
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
cara.city
Ken Shirriff’s whole article here goes into the history of Navajo involvement in chip fabrication, it’s very interesting: www.righto.com/2024/08/pent...
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
cara.city
oh my god a year ago, almost to the day, I made a post about this and today, it's right in front of me at MOMA
A quilt made from the design of a Pentium chip, it's red and light blue and made of streaks of darker and lighter color
smeadleonard.bsky.social
This one I'm slightly less sure about - the shape of her chin and eyebrows seems different and it's hard to tell if she has the same distinctive profile. But that might also be a question of age or changing style - it certainly wouldn't surprise me to learn she is the same person, or a relative.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
I definitely think they're all the same woman! There's something very distinctive in all her facial features, even in the arch of her eyebrows.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
A nice Wikimedia Commons find from this week - a floral diagram of a wallflower (Erysimum bicolor "Bowles' Mauve"), made from the flower itself.

#FloralFriday #FlowersOnFriday
A bloom of Erysimum bicolor (wallflower), deconstructed and laid out in the style of a floral diagram illustration so all parts of the flower can be seen. It creates a mandala-like arrangement of pistil, stamens, and petals. The petals are bright purple-magenta, the pistil bright green, and other elements white, light green, and light purple, all on a black background.
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
pjvphotography.bsky.social
"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?"

Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
A pika sits on a mossy rock. Tighter crop of the same pika, focusing on its head. An even tighter crop, focusing more on the pika's eye. An extremely tight crop of the pika's eye, emphasizing their reflection of an early morning mountain scene.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
I'm excited to say I'm taking part in the Totally Thames Festival 2025, presenting "William Morris's Thames: Inspiration and Resource" for the William Morris Society UK.

The talk will take place online on Wednesday, September 24th, 6-7pm London time.

thamesfestivaltrust.org/whats-on/wil...
Thames Festival Trust - William Morris's Thames: Inspiration and Resource @ Totally Thames 2025 - Thames Festival Trust
An illustrated lecture exploring William Morris's relationship with the River Thames through his beautiful patterns.
thamesfestivaltrust.org
smeadleonard.bsky.social
And always before age 40, that’s what average lifespan means.
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
ianmcque.bsky.social
Lake District farm buildings, watercolour
Watercolour painting, a Lake District landscape with farm buildings
smeadleonard.bsky.social
For #TextileTuesday, here are some objects I fell in love with while poking around on the V&A collections website last week: samples of woven fabrics designed by C.F.A. Voysey between 1895 and 1900, woven in strips to show different colorway options.
Sample of "The Duleek", a woven fabric with a symmetrical repeating pattern of trees, stags, swans, and doves. The motifs are flattened and stylized. The pattern is woven in strips of five colorways: tonal green, purple blue and green, tonal orange-reds with greyish doves, tonal yellow-orange, and tonal teal blue. Sample of a woven fabric with a repeating pattern of highly stylized trees, in a shape almost like a playing card spade, rising from layered hills. The pattern is woven in strips of four colorways: tonal yellow, tonal pink-purple, tonal orange-reds, and multi-colored pink, purple, and dark green.
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
smeadleonard.bsky.social
I’m also interested in this distribution model because TJ Maxx is a major source of William Morris goods in the US, specifically William Morris At Home, a brand that works with the William Morris Gallery - so again, a museum/homewares crossover. I’d bet it’s all the same wholesaler.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
Another branch of my family also owns a National Portrait Gallery London Admiral Lord Nelson mug we picked up at another North Carolina TJ Maxx maybe 15 years ago.
smeadleonard.bsky.social
Something I find endlessly fascinating about American TJ Maxx is that they clearly have a deal with a UK overstock distributor, and that distributor offers generic gift shop goods but also branded products. Thus: a mug of National Trust East Midlands properties, purchased in Western North Carolina.
An array of three mugs a kitchen table. Their designs are: lavender and bees; a cartoony illustration of National Trust properties shown on a map, with the text ‘East Midlands’ inside the rim; and a Eurasian goldfinch and a blue tit on teasels. They all have TJ Maxx price tags ($5.99 each) and the map and lavender ones have Made in England stickers. Closer detail of the East Midlands mug showing more properties. It’s slightly out of focus so the property names can’t be read, sorry.
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
smeadleonard.bsky.social
Did you know: The inventor of the Erector Set donated at least two of his champion German shepherds to the Yale Peabody Museum as specimens.

collections.peabody.yale.edu/search/Recor...
YPM MAM 004925
Canis familiaris Linnaeus, 1758
collections.peabody.yale.edu
smeadleonard.bsky.social
For #FragmentFriday, here's a nice bit of fabric I came across this week.

Furnishing fabric, printed cotton. Possibly Bannister Hall print works, c. 1870-1890.

V&A CIRC.1034-1925

To give some idea of the pattern scale, this piece's width is about 34 cm, or just over 13 inches.
A piece of fabric with a light green background, decorated with a naturalistic pattern of large clusters of purple rhododendron blooms with yellow centers, connected by spindly brown branches with small green leaves.
Reposted by Sarah Mead Leonard
arthistoryanimalia.bsky.social
For #WorldGoatDay 🐐:
Asai Kiyoshi (Japan, 1901-1968)
#Goats, c. 1950s
color woodblock print
ukiyo-e.org/image/wbp/89...
#JapaneseArt
vertical color woodblock print, illustration of two goat heads in profile facing opposite directions, white goat facing left behind and black goat facing right in front