What's News at MESDA

Portraits Discovered on Antiques Roadshow on Display at Winston-Salem Museum

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem announces that four significant local portraits will soon be on display at the museum. The discovery of the paintings on Antiques Roadshow will be aired Monday night, May 16th at 8:00 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Last July, Alice Fitzgibbon of Nashville, Tenn. packed four small portraits of her ancestors and drove them to the Antiques Roadshow event in Biloxi, Miss. An artist herself, Alice knew the portraits were special and hoped the experts at Antiques Roadshow could tell her more about them. She was very excited when Southern folk art expert Ken Farmer of Radford, Va. recognized the paintings as the work of a watercolor artist known as the Guilford Limner, an itinerant portraitist who worked in Guilford County, N.C. during the 1820s. He painted at least 35 known portraits of local businessmen, planters and their families.

The portraits are of Moses Gibson, his wife Elizabeth Paisley and their daughters Eliza Ann and Anny Jane. The Gibsons lived in Guilford County until 1841 when they moved west, ultimately settling in what is today Benton County, Miss. While in Guilford County, Moses Gibson was a farmer and an elder in Bethel Presbyterian Church, located just west of present-day Gibsonville, named for his family.

After learning the significance of her portraits, Fitzgibbon and her family generously decided to place them on long-term loan to MESDA. One of the museum’s galleries represents an interior of the 1766 McLean house, which was located only a few miles from the Gibson family home. As rare examples of early North Carolina portraiture, MESDA is thrilled to have the Gibson family displayed in its Piedmont North Carolina gallery.