Blisses

Families such as the Hydes, Backuses, Clevelands, Blisses, and Huntingtons moved there to escape the crowded downtown.

'David Ruggles' 2010

"You will actually experience that landscape the way the Blisses did," Birnbaum said.

Plenty of chances to get to know Washington, D.C., coming up 2010

Other members of her family have also invited visitors for the weekend, though, and as the bewildered guests soon discover, when it comes to playing parlour games, the Blisses are champions.

This week's new theatre 2010

Families such as the Hydes, Backuses, Clevelands, Blisses, and Huntingtons moved there to escape the crowded downtown.

'David Ruggles' 2010

Families such as the Hydes, Backuses, Clevelands, Blisses, and Huntingtons moved there to escape the crowded downtown.

'David Ruggles' 2010

It's not clear that the thought of the Blisses having a sacred silver plate once used for the holiest of Christian rites in 6th-century Syria or Constantinople would intoxicate its original Byzantine owners.

Dumbarton Oaks Museum reopens 2008

But there is a tension throughout the collection between the Blisses' not entirely suppressed urge to shop wantonly and their disciplined pursuit of Byzantine and pre-Columbian pieces.

Dumbarton Oaks Museum reopens 2008

"The thought of your having it intoxicates me," he is quoted saying, in the newly published catalogue, when the Blisses decided to purchase an exquisite silver paten, or platter used for holding the host during the Eucharist.

Dumbarton Oaks Museum reopens 2008

What impulse drove the Blisses to want Flemish tapestries, Mayan limestone panels and gold reliquaries?

Dumbarton Oaks Museum reopens 2008

That privilege is now maintained by scholars such as the ones who gather in the little hive -- a campus including a library by renowned architect Robert Venturi, and "refectory" for communal dining -- that the Blisses started to assemble decades ago.

Dumbarton Oaks Museum reopens 2008