May 21, 2013

First Foray

By daseger

Between my end-of-semester obligations and travel I have completely neglected my garden during its busiest season, so I took my first foray out there this weekend for a quick assessment. As usual, there have been losses (even with the impressive snow cover we had this year) and gains: ferns, ferns, and more ferns, popping up everywhere. My borders of lady’s mantle on one side and golden alexanders on the other are fine, but the center perennial bed needs work–so off to the nursery I went. There are several nurseries that I like in our (greater) area, but this weekend I went up to one of my most dependable destinations, Rolling Green Nursery in Greenland, New Hampshire: nice people, nice layout, good selection, good advice. This year, they seem to have expanded their selection of garden statues quite dramatically. After a brief glance at the big hand and mushroom, I went straight for the germander, a great herb for edging, of which Rolling Green seems to have a constant supply. Then it was off to the water garden for inspiration (ours is a mess), shade plants, and shrubs.

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Back at home, I made my first foray into the dirt to plant and weed (already!) and rearrange; a few spots look okay, but most of the garden is not ready for prime time yet.

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Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Nature

May 19, 2013

Two Churches and a Park

By daseger

Apologies for posting multiple pictures of the park across from my house in the space of a few weeks, but the flowering trees have been particularly beautiful this year. Since this space is constantly within my view, I am always trying to picture what it looked like in the past, when not just one but two churches successively occupied the space. Even though I’m a great admirer of the built landscape (when it is well-built), I think I prefer the empty space, especially in the midst of densely-settled Salem. Although if Samuel McIntire’s majestic first South Congregational Church was still standing, I might change my mind—but its 166-foot-high steeple would certainly dwarf my house! That’s the main effect that I’m constantly trying to conjure up–I may ask my husband to make a rendering one day.

The park today and the two churches: Samuel McIntire’s Church was built in 1804-5 and destroyed by fire in 1903, and quickly replaced by the Gothic Revival structure that you see below, which itself burned down in 1950. Quite the contrast! The word on the street is that there were hopes of erecting a third church on the site (this time by a Greek Orthodox congregation), but one prominent resident foiled those plans by purchasing it himself and donating it to the neighborhood association. All the householders on Chestnut Street now pay dues to maintain the park, which is open to everyone.

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McIntire Park South Church 1891

McIntire Park South Congregational Church 1910

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I think I’ve shown these images of the churches as well (The amazing Frank Cousins photograph is from 1891; the postcard of the “new” church is from 1910) before as well (I’m nearly reblogging here!), but I do have some interior shots of both churches which I just found, and a salvaged capital from McIntire’s church:  can you imagine the struggle to salvage precious pieces of wood while the fire raged? It might have been someone from my house that ran over there and grabbed this! That’s a moment (not so pleasant) that I try to imagine: what it must have been like to wake up in the middle of the night and see this blazing inferno just outside my bedroom window; no doubt there was real fear that the fire would spread and the famous spire would collapse onto the house–my house. What a scary, horrible night that must have been. 110 years later, all is calm over there this morning.

McIntire Park interior of South Church Peabody & Tilton

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McIntire Park South Congregational Church interior 1920s

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All historic photographs from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, with the exception of the last one, which is from the Estey Organ Company in Vermont, which maintains a virtual museum and an archive of all of its organs.

8 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses, Nature, Salem

May 17, 2013

Fashion and Art, centuries apart

By daseger

One big fashion and art exhibition closes this month while another opens: at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity closes on May 27 while across the Atlantic, In Fine Style: the Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion just opened at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in London. I had hoped to see both exhibitions, but will probably end up of seeing neither; for some reason I thought the Met show was up all summer. Oh well, I have been perusing the catalog of the former and I’m already familiar with most of the paintings in the latter, and I have some general comparative observations, which would almost certainly either be reinforced or refuted if I saw the actual shows.

First observation: the early modern era was a much better time for MEN’s fashion. Tudor and Stuart men got to dress up in fabulous, colorful clothing for all sorts of occasions, and they had ARMOUR.  There is no comparison for the Belle Epoque. One of the galleries in the Met show is entitled “Frock Coats and Fashion: the Urban Male”, but these stockbrokers are clearly no match for the enigmatic sixteenth-century man in red or King Charles I.

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Art and Fashion Red  Art and Fashion Charles I

Edgar Degas, Portraits at the Stock Exchange, 1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Portrait of a Man in Red, German/Netherlandish School, c. 1530-50, Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Daniel Mytens, Portrait of H.M. King Charles I, 1628, Royal Collection© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Second observation: black-and-white is classic. No matter what the occasion, black-and-white attire is timeless and striking. The Met exhibition has a gallery of black dresses and white dresses, also completely classic, but what I notice looking at both eras is the eternal elegance of the two non-colors together. Below we have two very different scenes:  seventeenth-century mourners and a lady of leisure on a sunny late nineteenth-century afternoon, united by their attire.

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Art and Fashion Black and White

Sir Anthony van Dyck,Thomas Killigrew and (?) William, Lord Croft, 1638; Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Albert Bartholomé, In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé),1881; “Summer Day Dress Worn by Mademe Bartholomé in the Painting ‘In the Conservatory”,1880, which is described as cotton printed with PURPLE dots and stripes but it reads black to me–a good illustration of why I should have seen this exhibition in person!

Third observation: texture = luxury+artistry. This is where the art and the fashion really meet. In both exhibitions, the fabrics are absolutely luxurious, and the artists’ ability to depict their textures is absolutely amazing. Obviously the Met exhibition, which places garments adjacent to paintings (as in the example above) illustrates this artistry in a really compelling way, but the artists of the Tudor-Stuart era, who are depicting royalty and nobility, are also compelled to inject that luxurious texture into their subjects’ portraits, as illustration of their exalted status.

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Glistening fabrics from both eras: James Tissot,Evening (The Ball),detail, 1878; Sir Peter Lely, Frances Teresa Stuart, Duchess of Richmond, c.1662, Royal Collection© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Fourth observation: it’s all in the details. Both exhibitions feature “little” things that are incredibly important: trims, jewelry, undergarments, patterns. Whether the sixteenth-century ruff or the nineteenth-century corset, details are important to these societies–and these artists. You would think that the details would be more important in the early modern portraits than the nineteenth-century en plein air paintings, but that is not the case. The details are always important.

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Art and Fashion

Details of Marcus Gheeradts the Younger’s (attributed) Anne of Denmark, 1614, Royal Collection © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, and Ckaude Monet’s Camille, 1866, as banners for their respective exhibitions.

11 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, Current Events, Design

May 15, 2013

Marshes and Mountains

By daseger

Last week, I discovered yet another Salem-born artist of the mid- and later nineteenth century in the usual way–by browsing through auction archives (a relatively new pastime of mine that I’ve got to nip in the bud, as it is very time-consuming!) This particular artist, Sylvester Phelps Hodgdon (1830-1906) did not dwell in Salem in his adulthood, but I continue to be amazed at the creative environment that existed in this era, another aspect of Salem’s history that is overwhelmed by its Witch City reputation.

Hodgdon was the son of a wealthy Salem currier who had married into one of Salem’s older families, which explains the prominent Phelps in his name (although he usually signed his paintings “S.P. Hodgdon”).  He appears to have moved to Boston in his early 20s, where he studied with the well-traveled Boston artist Benjamin Champney and worked for the L.H. Bradford lithography firm. For most of his life, he lived in the Dorchester section of Boston, and maintained a studio at the Tremont Studio building downtown, along with a host of prominent artists and architects. He was clearly part of the Boston art scene and community, teaching classes and exhibiting his work at the Boston Art Club in its heyday. But like so many Boston-based artists of this era, Hodgdon was drawn to northern New England for his subject matter: there are few streetscapes among his works, but rather gilded landscapes of marshes, valleys, and mountains–predominately in New Hampshire. Therefore he is generally characterized as one of the “White Mountain Painters”, along with Champney, who created one of America’s first art colonies by inviting a succession of painters, including Hodgdon, to come to his summer residence in North Conway from the 1850s on. This was clearly Hodgdon’s preferred milieu, but I did manage to find a few local scenes among his digitized works.

Hodgdon On the Marsh 1861

Hodgdon, Long Beach Nahant

Hodgdon Echo Lake, Franconia

On the Marsh/A Salem, Massachusetts landscape,1861, Skinner Auctions Archive; Long Beach, Nahant, 1861, Carlsen Gallery Auctions Archive; Echo Lake, Franconia Notch, 1858, Collection of  John J. and Joan R. Henderson. Photograph courtesy of the New Hampshire Historical Society. All the sources indicate that Hodgdon preferred to work at the “extremes” of the day, in the early morning and at dusk.

This last painting is among the most acclaimed of his White Mountains works, and as you can see, it dates from early in his career, while he was still in his 20s and working as a lithographer by day/artist by night (and summer). I was able to gather a few other images to add some context to Hodgdon’s life, including some examples of his lithography for the Bradford firm and a photograph of the Tremont Studio building in Boston: all traces of his past that are now sadly gone.

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Hodgdon American Antiquarian Society OMM

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Hodgdon’s lithographs for L.H. Bradford: “Old Man on the Mountain”, Franconia Notch (whose visage crumbled to the ground in 2003) American Antiquarian Society; Tabernacle Church, Salem, 1854, Boston Athenaeum, and the Tremont Studio in Boston, New York Public Library: gone, gone & gone.

4 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

May 13, 2013

Paper Dresses

By daseger

When I visit my brother in the Hudson River Valley I head for downtown Rhinebeck and one of my favorite shops, Paper Trail, as soon as it is politely possible: this is a destination shop. It’s not only the merchandise, it‘s the merchandising, and the paper creations that are in the windows and scattered about the store. Every time I go there there’s always a dress or two, shoes, and other works of art that make this shop a gallery. This time, there was a beautiful paper wedding dress (with butterfly back) in the window, fashioned by local paper couturier Linda Filley of upcycled materials. And much more inside:  Filley’s “windblown girl” dress made of recycled craft paper and shoes, paper chandeliers, flowers, birdhouses, map art, and even not-so-mundane cards.

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6 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Design, Home, Paper

May 11, 2013

Mother Shipton

By daseger

Rather contrarily, my offering for Mother’s Day weekend is not a warm, loving, and lovely caregiver but a prophesying crone:  Mother Shipton, who most likely never existed.  Supposedly born in the first years of the new Tudor dynasty in a Yorkshire cave (the product of  a union between a poor wretch named Agatha and the Devil), Ursula Southeil or “Mother Shipton” rose to fame in the mid-seventeenth century, long after her supposed death. Just before the English Civil War, a time of high anxiety indeed, a series of Mother Shipton pamphlets suddenly appeared, containing predictions of things that, for the most part, had already happened, along with dire warnings of war and destruction.

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The first prophecy on the second 1642 pamphlet is typical Mother Shipton: Joane Waller should live to heare of Wars within this Kingdome but not to see them. The Civil War broke out in the same year of as the tract was published, but of course Waller had died the year before. A similar assertion regarding Henry VIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, that he would see York but never get there, was one of Mother Shipton’s most famous “predictions”.  Her published prophecies continued through the Civil War (closely tied to current events) and after, and she joined the ranks of such legendary magicians as Merlin.

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Shipton Prophecies from 1648 & 1661

In the later seventeenth century, Mother Shipton’s biography and predictions were embellished rather vastly by a series of publications entitled The Life and Death of Mother Shipton, and her story was adapted for entertainment purposes, thus cementing her now-legendary character. The transition from ominous witch-soothsayer to stock character is emblematic of the emergence of a collective rationalist mentality in the seventeenth century, with a corresponding decline in belief in magic and “wonder”, now assuming its more modern meaning.

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Mother Shipton Life and Death

Mother Shipton play 1670p

And that would probably be the end of Mother Shipton, consigned to a relatively minor character in the long history of sibyls and soothsayers, if she was not resurrected in the Victorian era. It’s always the Victorians! Charles Dickens first referenced her in a 1856 story, and then the entrepreneurial bookseller Charles Hindley published a new set of rhymed and timely prophecies that were supposedly based on a newly-discovered manuscript in the British Museum (he later confessed to making them up). Now Mother Shipton was predicting railroads, ships made of iron, wireless communication and all sorts of industrial innovations, as well as the ominous warning that the world then to an end shall come/ In Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-One, which was changed to 1991 in early-twentieth-century reprints. By that time, she had evolved yet again, into a fairy-tale character and (later) a tourist attraction.

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Mother Shipton's Cave Yorkshire

Charles Townley print of Mother Shipton and her familiar, 1800, British Museum, Linley Sanbourne and W. Heath Robinson illustrations of Mother Shipton on her broomstick for Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1888 & 1915); the entrance to Mother Shipton’s Cave in Knaresborough, “England’s Oldest Tourist Attraction” (shades of Salem!).

8 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

May 9, 2013

Early May Meander

By daseger

May is my absolute favorite month but also the busiest time of the year for me, with grading and other end-of-the-semester obligations, annual meetings for every single Salem organization to which I belong, and lots of stuff to attend to in the house and, of course, the garden. Frenzied activity and frustration, and lots of running around. This past week we have had absolutely beautiful weather: in typical New England fashion, everything just burst. So I took sporadic breaks from grading, not my favorite activity, and meandered about town. I did not have to go very far, as my neighborhood is particularly beautiful this time of year, and sometimes (often, after every other one) I can just raise my head up from the pile of blue books before me and look out the window and see something beautiful or interesting.

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A photo shoot on Chestnut Street last weekend, involving quite a lot of people, and a single artist painting the park on the same day.

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Admiring one neighbor’s lush yard, and another’s “spiderweb” window.

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My jack-in-the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum) have arrived!!! Four this year!!!

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Sorry this cardinal is a little blurry, but I chased him all around the neighborhood, determined to get his picture, and this is as close as I could get.

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Nature, Salem

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