Fleur-de-Lys Studios

Fleur-de-Lys Studios is the house that was never a house — a studio building dressed like a fairy tale. Sydney Burleigh, the Providence painter, and architect Edmund Willson built it in 1885 on Thomas Street as working studios for artists: the half-timbered facade with its decorative stucco, the leaded casement windows, the north-lighted studios at the back. It's the Arts and Crafts movement's key monument in America, a building whose facade is the art it was built to house.

The studios never stopped working — Burleigh painted there until his death, deeding the building to the Providence Art Club, which has kept it for member artists ever since. The legend came in 1921: Burleigh's protégé took her own life in the building, and the ghost the artists report — the woman's presence in the studios, the disturbances in the working rooms — has been there since. The affair rumors attached to the story; the suicide is the documented fact.

The building keeps its double register — the National Historic Landmark that looks like a storybook house on a colonial street, still full of working artists in the studios where the legend's resident died. The file holds the art world's ghost: the protégé who never left the studio, in the building that was built for art and stayed for it.

Fleur-de-Lys Studios is the archive's artist file — the 1885 Arts and Crafts studio building where Burleigh's protégé died in 1921, still working studios, still holding the ghost of the woman who never left the craft.