Life Imitates Art

Summer 2020

Two professors recreate David Ryckaert III’s Interior of an Inn.

Around the world, people have been recreating famous artworks using household items — often incorporating toilet paper as a symbolic joke. Professor Elizabeth Marlowe (art and art history) and her husband, Professor Rob Nemes (history), stepped up to the Getty Art Challenge by recreating artist David Ryckaert III’s Interior of an Inn (ca. 1640). The oil painting is part of Colgate’s Picker Art Gallery collection and was on view with the gallery’s other 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings in the spring exhibition, Works In Progress: Original Materials.

“This image was an easy choice; it is one of my favorites in the exhibition,” Marlowe says. “I immediately saw a way to put toilet paper — the iconic consumer good of this moment in the pandemic — to good use.” To stage the piece, the professors cleared out their basement (finding the toy cat in the process) and enlisted the help of their two daughters — one as a subject, the other as the photographer.

Marlowe, who taught Critical Museum Theory in the spring semester, adds that she believes the field of museum studies will “look back at this moment and think about the fact that so many people chose to engage with art in this shared, joyful, goofy, public way. What might that tell us about how museums can create community (even remotely), or about the role museums can play in times of trauma?”