Enfilade

Wallis’s Elegant and Instructive Game exhibiting the Wonders of Art in Each Quarter of the World, ca. 1820
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art)

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Opening this month at YCBA:

Instruction and Delight: Children’s Games from the Ellen and Arthur Liman Collection
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 17 January — 23 May 2019

Curated by Elisabeth Fairman with Laura Callery

By the beginning of the eighteenth century in Britain, parents and teachers had begun to embrace wholeheartedly a suggestion from the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) that “Learning might be made a Play and Recreation to Children.” The material culture of this period, and the subsequent generation, reveals a significant shift in thinking, as adults found fresh value in childhood and in play for its own sake. British publishers leapt at the chance to design books and games for both instruction and delight. This small display celebrates the recent gift of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century children’s games and books to the Center by Ellen and Arthur Liman, Yale JD 1957.

Instruction and Delight: Children’s Games from the Ellen and Arthur Liman Collection has been curated by Elisabeth Fairman, Chief Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Center, with the assistance of Laura Callery, Senior Curatorial Assistant.

A catalogue appeared in 2017 from Pointed Leaf Press:, with additional information (and images) from this HyperAllergic piece by Claire Voon).

Ellen Liman, Georgian and Victorian Board Games: The Liman Collection (New York: Pointed Leaf Press, 2017), 182 pages, ISBN: 978-1938461439, $65.