Displaying items by tag: Eighteenth Century

Opportunity. That was what brought James Thompson to New York in 1748 at age twenty.

He came from the linen-manufacturing town of Newry in Northern Ireland.1 Some of the best seed for growing flax, from which linen was made, came from New York, so there was active trade between the two communities. It was not surprising, then, that Thompson gravitated to the merchant community in his new land, establishing his own shipping business between New York and his home country.

Neoclassicism is the name given to the various classicizing styles that developed in Europe in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and which profoundly influenced the fine arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Artists and craftsmen found inspiration in the order, clarity, and reason of the art of ancient Greece and Rome and sought to re-create the spirit and forms of the classical world. From each of the different disciplines came something at once new and classically inspired.