Brandywine’s newest dollhouse
Over the years the Brandywine Museum has acquired several dollhouses for its collection, including a 1930s commercially fabricated house designed in the International Style of architecture, its starkly modernist rooms furnished with clear acrylic furniture.
The Brandywine’s most recent acquisition is the Peters-Herdeg house, a miniature replica of an 18th century mansion in Chadds Ford. Bought in 1963 by Judith and John Herdeg, the couple spent years restoring the house to its original colonial condition and furnishing it with colonial-era antiques and original paintings by 18th century artists like Charles Willson Peale and John Singleton Copley.
Then they decided to do it all over again, but at 1/12 scale.
While the Wyeth dollhouse plays fast and loose with scale, Judith Herdeg commissioned artisan Roger Demers to spend 5 ½ years making sure the miniature house is faithful to the original from floor to roof.
“It’s hard to express how exacting he was with this house,” Bickford said. “Because the floorboards were irregular colonial architecture, if you look in the house they are equally irregular. That’s 5,000 handcrafted cedar shingles [on the roof]. It weighs 175 pounds. An immense piece of craftsmanship.”
Judith Herdeg hired more than 50 craftspeople to make furniture for the dollhouse. The replicas of paintings by Peale and Copley are actual paintings themselves, tiny copies of the original portraits.
“Until her death in 2024, [Judith] was commissioning miniaturists to replicate the pieces in there, the same level of detail,” Bickford said. “Drawers pull out of dressers. Folding tables have working hinges. The one thing I found that doesn’t work is the tall clock, it does not have working clockwork.”
The exhibit features interior and exterior photographs of the real Peters-Herdeg house, so visitors can examine the reproduction’s precision. The house, its restoration and interiors are the subjects of a book, “The Stories They Tell…from the Herdeg Collection” (2021).
After Judith Herdeg died in 2024, the house was sold to a new owner. The historically designated building remains a private residence.
The “Home for the Holidays” exhibition is rounded out with paintings and holiday cards made by members of the Wyeth family. John McCoy, Ann Wyeth’s husband, designed cards for Hallmark, and Henriette Wyeth painted a Christmas watercolor scene.
Neighbor and family friend Karl Kuerner painted a winter scene with a figure of Carolyn Wyeth, the daughter of N.C. Wyeth and Keurner’s art teacher.
Andrew Wyeth and his sister Ann were known for painting one-of-a-kind cards and mailing them to friends.
“Christmas was a really important time for the Wyeth family. They really love to celebrate the holidays and they were a very close-knit family,” Bickford said. “Ann Wythe McCoy lived in the area for the majority of her life, as did many of the many of N.C. Wyeth’s children. These dollhouses are replicating a lot of that memory from their own childhood.”
“Home for the Holidays” will be on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art until Jan. 4.
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