Media Relations, Strategy & Marketing Consultation for the Museum's many exhibitions, programs, and its remarkable and expanding collections
The Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia seeks to inspire curiosity, inquiry and creativity by engaging broad audiences in exhibitions, programs and research based on its remarkable and expanding collections. The museum was founded by legendary book dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach and his brother and business partner Philip. With an outstanding collection of rare books, manuscripts, furniture and art, the Rosenbach is a museum and world-renowned research library, set within two historic 1865 townhouses, that reflects an age when great collectors lived among their treasures.
Visitor Information
Rosenbach Museum & Library
2008-2010 Delancey Place
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Museum Hours:
Tuesday: 12-5pm
Wednesday & Thursday: 12-8pm
Friday: 12-5pm
Saturday & Sunday: 12-6pm
Closed Mondays and National Holidays
Admission: Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and groups of 10 or more, $5 for students and children ages 5-18, and free for children under 5.
PHILADELPHIA — Concluding a 30-year mystery, theRosenbach Museum & Library has located and acquired a portrait of an early member of the Gratz Family, prominent Jewish early Americans who made their home in Philadelphia.
One night, in Larry and Nina’s room, a mural grew.
A joyful procession - a dog, two boys, two birds, a lion, a girl, a bear, and a sun - was being painted by a dear family friend, who spread paper and paint jars on the floor and sometimes stood on their beds to work.
It was 1961, and the family friend - Uncle Moo Moo - was Maurice Sendak, 33.
Fifty years later, the mural - in two hefty slabs - has made its way from the 13th-floor apartment overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park to a new home: the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Center City, which houses Sendak’s papers, books, art, and ephemera.
“As a kid, it was just an amazing experience,” said Larry Chertoff, 55, who with his sister Nina, 53, donated the mural in memory of their parents, Roslyn and Lionel Chertoff, and Sendak’s longtime partner, Eugene Glynn.
The horrors of the American Civil War, wrote Walt Whitman in 1863, “open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity … tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul’s, the body’s tragedies, bursting the petty bounds of art.”
A century and half after the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 sparked the conflict, Americans are still trying, as Whitman did, to comprehend our nation’s most “terrible, feafulest tests.”
(AP) PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Long before award-winning illustrator and writer Maurice Sendak’s world of wild things charmed millions of young readers and changed the notion of what children’s literature could look like, some of his now-classic characters frolicked on a wall overlooking New York’s Central Park for an audience of two.
A mural Sendak painted in 1961 was removed - wall and all - after his friends, who were the apartment’s longtime residents, had passed away. Now, it is being restored in a Philadelphia museum devoted to his work.
“What’s nice is it’s like a time machine,” the 82-year-old Sendak told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his Connecticut home. “It captures a part of the past for a moment, and friends who were very dear to me.”
On Tuesday, visitors to the Rosenbach Museum and Library will see what museum officials call their most important acquisitions in many years - a Thomas Sully portrait of Rebecca Gratz, Philadelphia’s renowned 19th-century Jewish American educator, philanthropist and social activist, and a portrait of her brother, Joseph Gratz, by G.P.A. Healy.
The Rosenbach now has two of Sully’s three portraits of Rebecca Gratz, as well as portraits of other Gratz family members, and major holdings of family papers and artifacts.
“We are very excited,” said museum director Derick Dreher. “It’s the most significant purchase in my 12 years as director, both in terms of dollars paid and the intrinsic value of the work to audiences in Philadelphia.”
At the Rosenbach Museum & Library, for example, contemporary artist Enrique Chagoya has put a new spin on a 19th-century print called “The Head Ache.” Chagoya substitutes the face of Barack Obama for the man in the George Cruikshank original as a commentary on today’s health-care debate, which has been enough to make anyone reach for the aspirin.
