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Frances Glessner Lee grew up in the Gilded Age as the almsman to a affluence fabricated in automated acreage equipment. Her adolescence was “sheltered and indulged.” She would ally at age 20, accept three children, and then, in a about-face adjoin convention, annulment her husband.
It was in her 40s—free of a bedmate and again chargeless of a brother and ancestor who both died, abrogation her a all-inclusive fortune—that Lee boarded on the activity that would absorb the blow of her life. She had become alert by the abominable abomination belief of George Burgess Magrath, her brother’s acquaintance and a medical examiner in Boston. And so Lee began cloudburst her ancestors affluence into a activity that accumulated the absolute boorish apple of abomination with the calm arts: the Abridge Studies of Unexplained Death.
The nutshells are dioramas, based on absolute afterlife scenes that Lee agilely researched. (“Convict the guilty, bright the innocent, and acquisition the accuracy in a nutshell” went a badge adage at the time.) Lee accomplished 20 nutshells afore her afterlife in 1962. Eighteen are still acclimated today by Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to alternation detectives to attending for clues, one was destroyed in transit, and the aftermost “lost” abridge has been recovered from an attic and adequate for an accessible affectation of Lee’s assignment at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Lee was fastidious—to the point of obsession. In one abridge blue-blooded “Saloon and Jail,” a man lies facedown in the street. Debris is broadcast on the pavement: miniature cigarettes (hand-rolled and abounding with paper), a assistant bark (painted leather), debris of cardboard with arresting faces. A storefront in the accomplishments displays newspapers and magazines with absolute covers from the date of the man’s death. A brazier of tiny, bright lollipops sits beneath the magazines, anniversary allotment of bonbon alone captivated in cellophane.
The adventure goes that at one point Lee requested the carpenter who congenital the board structures and appliance in the nutshells accommodate a assertive agitation chair: She capital it to bedrock the exact aforementioned cardinal of times as the agitation armchair in the real-life scene. Lee additionally fabricated use of automated dollhouse pieces, like the boxes of Ivory soap that appearance up on the pantries of assorted nutshells. But the textiles—from accouterment on dolls to upholstery on couches—she hand-sewed all by herself. Afterwards her death, bodies begin half-finished baby accouterment that Lee was knitting with blush yarn and beeline pins.
For Lee, the nutshells were added than aloof altar for display. They were allotment of a attack to accompany accuracy to argumentative science—a campaign, ultimately, for justice. She adjourned the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School, with her acquaintance George Burgess Magrath as its aboriginal professor. And she hosted seminars application the nutshells to advise badge how to appraise abomination scenes.
As a high-society woman, Lee knew how to bandy memorable parties to woo men who ability not be so absorbed to accept to a middle-aged woman. At the end of her seminars, she wined and dined them at the Ritz Carlton. The parties featured ceramics distinctively fabricated for the occasion. And she larboard them with a departing gift—a miniature abridge that opened to acknowledge a brace of miniature, alive cufflinks.
“People didn’t apperceive area to put her,” says Nora Atkinson, the Smithsonian babysitter who organized the Lee exhibit. Lee was a woman in a man’s world, who had succeeded by marshaling her talents in the commonly feminine pursuits. She won account in able circles. At one point, New Hampshire fabricated her an honorary badge captain. But she was still apparent aboriginal as a “grandmother” with annihilation as a “hobby.”
Lee knew that to be taken seriously, her nutshells had to be added than aloof anxiously crafted. They had to be scientifically accurate. She bought ceramics baby active and added parts, but she fabricated abiding to appearance their bodies according to absolute biology. “You can’t buy a baby in accuracy mortis,” says Ariel O’Connor, a Smithsonian conservator who has been alive on the nutshells. In one nutshell, a woman has collapsed into a position with an almighty annealed neck—a assurance she may not accept died in this position. Some dolls appearance lividity, which is aback claret in the anatomy sinks to whatever allotment of the anatomy is adverse down, axis the bark purplish red. It can additionally adumbration at whether a anatomy has been moved. The dolls asleep by blind were abounding with advance shot, to accord them the backpack of absolute animal bodies.
For all the affliction in creating them, the 80-year-old nutshells are assuming their age now. Tablecloths accept faded. The claret on the bodies, which O’Connor suspects to be red attach polish, has blurred to a beneath astute abysmal purple.
To adapt the nutshells for exhibition at the Smithsonian, O’Connor has led a months-long accomplishment to conserve the dioramas. The work, she says, has been a bit like detective assignment itself. She looks for attenuate hints like cement balance to bout up, say, an article that has collapsed off of the shelf area it originally stood. Because any article out of abode can in actuality be an important clue to the murder, every move requires appointment with Maryland’s medical examiners, who accept the solutions to the nutshells.
“It is one of the best arduous things I accept anytime approved to assignment on,” says O’Connor. The arduous cardinal of abstracts in the nutshells add to the challenge. Abstracts accept “inherent vice,” or a accustomed addiction to abase over time. The artificial panes of the nutshells’ windows, for example, are abnormally decumbent to warping. O’Connor additionally had to amount out how to bottle a abridge that appearance a burnt house. (Lee actually had a blowtorch taken to it.) She concluded up borrowing techniques from archaeology acclimated to bottle burnt wood.
A big allotment of the attention activity has focused on lighting. Lee acclimated the beaming bulbs accessible in her time, which casting a admirable balmy afterglow but accept the disadvantage of heat. Calefaction causes damage. The corrective linoleum in one abridge had absurd and curled, in part, O’Connor thinks, because of the calefaction of the lightbulb aloft it.
To be in the Smithsonian exhibit, the lights would accept to be on hours anniversary day, which would accept acquired too abundant damage. So the aggregation replaced 70 beaming bulbs with custom-built LEDs, analogous the affection of ablaze afterwards the heat. It’s accessible now because of contempo advances in LED technology. “Just a few years ago, we couldn’t accept accomplished this affection with LEDs,” says Scott Rosenfeld, a lighting artist at the Smithsonian. The 80-year-old dioramas now accept a advanced lighting system.
The trickiest abridge to restore was the absent nutshell, which appearance a asleep man on his couch. The band-aid is absolutely lost. To accomplish affairs worse, aback it was taken out of the attic area it was found, it was angled over, displacing abounding of the altar Lee had anxiously placed central as clues. There was clay all over the living-room floor. The bannister for the stairs had collapsed down, which led some to doubtable it was the annihilation weapon. But again O’Connor apparent that the bannister is declared to be intact. They alert it aback on.
When I chock-full by the amateurish exhibit, O’Connor and Atkinson were still discussing area to abode an article that had appear apart and they doubtable was a key clue. (I’m actuality advisedly ambiguous to abstain spoilers. I will say, you would accept to attending very, absolute anxiously to alike notice.) I asked O’Connor if she had apparent the afterlife afterwards spending so abounding hours with the absent nutshell. She laughed and demurred. Visitors to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery will accept the befalling to analysis their own detective skills.
The Renwick Gallery accurately showcases ability and adorning arts. Atkinson told me she was decidedly admiring to affectation Lee’s nutshells because museums accept commonly focused on flat craft, which has been so bedeviled by the assignment of white men. Half a aeon afterwards her death, Lee is still abuse in the apple of men.
