Car Museum Honors ‘Wonders in Wood, on Land and by Sea’

The Audrain Automobile Museum in Newport, Rhode Island, is celebrating the early days of the auto industry, when a plentiful raw material—wood—was crafted into wheels, frames, steering wheels, trim, and even exterior surfaces.

The exhibit, “Wonders in Wood, on Land and by Sea,” is an eclectic mix of classic cars that use wood in their construction, along with classic, wooden sail and power boats—a natural match, considering Newport’s posh history of yachts and luxury cars.

“This show is something I’ve always wanted to do,” said David de Muzio, the museum’s executive director, Curatorial & Collections. The show runs through June 11.

Besides the fabulous cars and boats, there’s also an ornate, wooden horse-drawn coach in the display. It was built in 1892 for a Vanderbilt relative, back when coach builders hadn’t yet moved on to horseless carriages.

De Muzio has an appreciation from wood. Before he joined the museum in 2014, he worked for 25 years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including a stretch as senior conservator of furniture and woodwork.

“Wood is a very utilitarian material. It’s plentiful, and obviously it predates steel as a building material,” he said in an interview. He says there’s a fair amount of overlap in the skills required to select, shape, and finish wood, whether for cars, boats, or furniture.

“There’s so much wood in pre-war cars. It can be structural and utilitarian, or cosmetic,” he said. By pre-war, he means pre-World War II.

As beautiful as the polished exterior finishes are, De Muzio emphasized wood in cars wasn’t just for decoration. Underneath the high-gloss finishes or mother-of-pearl inlays, it was also common in the past to use wood to build the internal structure supporting sheetmetal body panels, de Muzio said.