To create this photographic album, Montgomery Barron paired each item with a meaningful background — a toile that wallpapered the family home or a tablecloth from 21, one of her mother’s favorite New York City restaurants. Over the years of Ellie’s illness, Montgomery Barron worked daily, climbing a tall ladder to attach fabric to strings fixed on a cornice to avoid marring the wall in the Rome apartment she shared with her husband, James Barron, an art gallerist. Once the work was completed, Montgomery Barron would carefully pack the portfolio and take it with her on her next visit to the States, first to her mother’s home outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and later, as the disease worsened, to a care center, where her mother died in 2007.
