Tag: alice winchester

Fig. 1. Silhouette of Alice Winchester (1907–1996) by Helen (1919–2018) and Nel Laughon (1946–2011), 1978. Initialed “HNL” in monogram and dated ’78 at lower right, and inscribed “Feb. 1, 1978 – H. & N. Laughon/ Cut from Photograph in Williamsburg, Va. – 1978 Antiques Forum.” on the back. Neville Elizabeth (Nel) and her mother, Helen, Laughon, were well-known cutters of silhouettes, traveling thirty thousand miles a year to museums and historical sites up and down the East Coast. Winchester files, promised gifts to the Archives of American Art. Alice Winchester was born in 1907 in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth of five children. Her father, Benjamin Severance Winchester, was a prominent Congregational minister and educator, the author of three books and numerous articles on religious education. Alice described him as “charming and . . . quite an innovative person [who] did a lot of interesting things in connection with the Congregational Church as a national movement. . . . And yet, he was no good at making money.” Because they were a big family, Alice said, they were always “kind of scratching and trying to get along on a little less than we’d like.” Nevertheless, she recalled her childhood as a happy one. Both her parents enjoyed their children, she said, “and we enjoyed them.”1 Pearl Adair Gunn, Alice’s mother, was born while her family was journeying west from Kentucky to Walla Walla, Washington, where her father, also a Congregational minister, was to take up a position. She grew up there and, unusually in those days for a girl from the West, attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1895. When she married Benjamin Winchester in 1897, Pearl began a life characterized by frequent moves. From Chicago, the family relocated to Concord, Massachusetts, where Alice attended kindergarten through second grade