As the political climate in Philadelphia grew increasingly charged throughout the 1770s, art became currency. This presentation allows Museum visitors to see the featured works of art through the lens of a truly seminal period in American history—to consider the unexpected roles art played in the lives of individuals and families during the American Revolution.

The Two Qalams explores the relationship between calligraphers and artists through five exemplary works of calligraphy, drawing, and painting dating from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

The invaluable resources in this exhibition--including books, pamphlets, scrapbooks, and ephemera--document an extraordinary civic event as well as the broader aesthetic and manufacturing forces at work in the Victorian era, which drove considerable social and economic change both here and abroad.

In 1660, the Antwerp artist and court painter David Teniers II (1610–1690) published the Theatrum Pictorium, the first illustrated printed catalogue of a major paintings collection. This opulent book contained etchings that reproduced 243 paintings in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the governor of the Southern Netherlands. The selection of paintings highlighted the archduke’s sixteenth-century Venetian masterpieces, largely acquired from the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, who had perished in the English Civil Wars (1642–51).