Category Archives: Art

June 16, 2026

The Art of Privateering

By daseger

So my title is a bit lofty and deceptive. There are beautiful miniatures of privateersmen and of course maritime paintings of great sea battles, but most of my post is going to be focused on a pen-and-ink “picture book” of privateering written and illustrated by a western New England medical doctor. I just had big book week, presenting Salem’s Centuries with my co-editor at the State Library of Massachusetts, and one of its chapters with my co-author for Historic New England’s Phillips House (where I also work in the summers). Both events went so well, and were even enjoyable; the staff at the State Library (an absolutely beautiful space in the Massachusetts State House) were just lovely and appreciative, as were my colleagues at the Phillips House. This latter talk was a bit more casual; it was actually a “conversation” between my co-author, Maria Pride, and I about Salem privateers, based on our piece on Jonathan Haraden in the book. Maria completed her Ph.D. dissertation on Massachusetts privateering just a few years ago at the University of Sterling in Scotland. We had our conversation outside near the Phillips Carriage House, and were followed by an amazing group of Salem musicians named Crowninshield Punch who sang some period maritime songs. Since we were outside, I decided to have a little program because we had some good quotes that we wanted to share (mostly by the privateers themselves, about their personal patriotism, which is often difficult to discern) and as I was putting it together I came across Pirates and Patriots of the Revolution. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Colonial Seamanship by Dr. C. Wilbur Keith while looking for illustrations. It looked at first like a child’s book, and I imagine it probably is, but the illustrations were charming, and when I started reading some of the entries I was really surprised at the detail (and the writing). So I kept reading! Dr. Keith was obviously very interested in his topic, and very talented. You can find it at the Internet Archive and I just purchased on old copy on ebay.

Well, these images will give you a taste of what Dr. Keith offers up in case you want to find your own copy of his little book. And everything is sourced—he referenced logbooks well before they were digitized. Along with Maria, I do not like to refer to Revolutionary privateers as “pirates” in any sense: they were certainly more regulated than the Elizabethan privateers I explored in my MA thesis. Instruction # 6 in the Continental Congress’s “Instructions to Privateers” essentially says:  don’t be a pirate! If anyone demonstrated the “art of privateering”, it was Jonathan Haraden, but I did want to share some material art too. I love Howard Pyle, and Howard Pyle loved pirates, and so I think he portrayed privateers as such, but still, An American Privateer Taking a British Prize (1908) is a great image.

A very famous “Jolly Tar” figurehead of a Virginia privateer was captured perfectly by WPA artist Mary E. Humes in 1935 (Now in the National Gallery of Art ). And there are quite a few miniature portraits of ship captains who started out as privateers, like Salem’s own Nathaniel West and the handsome Jasper Ely Cropsey in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. So many ships: single portraits like that of the Avon at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and in battle scenes like Robert Dodd’s famous depiction of the Battle off Halifax (1782) in which the Salem privateer Jack‘s Captain David Ropes was killed.

A View of His Majesty’s Brigg Observer, Commanded by Lieut. John Crymes (to whom this print is inscribed) Engaging the American Privateer Ship Jack, John Ropes (commander), by Night on the 29th of May 1782, Off the Harbour of Hallifax, Nova Scotia”. Aquatint by Robert Dodd, 1784

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November 3, 2025

A Sampler of Salem Folk Art

By daseger

Salem is not particularly known for its folk art, I think. The standard for craftsmanship during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century was so high, and production so prolific, that the curatorial and collecting emphasis always seems to be on the best and the brightest of the decorative arts rather than the more idiosyncratic. But I’m always looking for interesting examples of folk art, and every once in a while I do a round-up of samplers, silhouettes and signs. The Peabody Essex Museum has wonderful examples of Salem-made folk art in their huge collection, including my favorite trade sign, featuring a bust of Paracelsus made for James Emerton’s Essex Street apothecary shop, samplers from the famous Sarah Stivours school, and the “soft sculpture” (I’m not sure what else to call it) of textile artist, author and abolitionist Lucy Hiller Lambert Cleveland. And all manner of maritime objects of course. The amazing decoys of Captain Charles Osgood, carved while the Captain was biding his time waiting for his gold rush ship to set sail from San Francisco back to Salem in 1849 and hidden in a friend’s hunting lodge in Rowley for a century thereafter, are valued quite highly. Most are in the collection of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, but one came up for auction recently with an impressive result.

 Lucy Hiller (Lambert) Cleveland, Sailor’s Home, mid-1800s, cotton, wood, leather, pigments, Gift of Mary T. Saunders, 1915, Peabody Essex Museum; Sally Rust’s Sampler from the Sarah Stivours School, 1788, Peabody Essex Museum; three Osgood decoys, Shelburne Museum.

But a lot of anonymous pieces crafted in Salem seem to sell for very little money. There’s a painting of Salem Harbor by an anonymous artist coming up for auction later this month at Eldred’s Auctions that is so beautiful I could fall into it—and it has a higher starting bid than I’ve seen before for folk art marine paintings. It seems worth it; this is not just a painting of a ship, but of life on land and sea. Contrast this with another nautical view below, a reverse glass painting of “Ship Siam of Salem / Built 1847 / Capt. Ebenezer Graves” sold by Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates Auctions. There’s certainly a lot more going on. Also from Evans, these two wonderful carved allegorical figures, which were apparently located at Salem Willows! I really can’t imagine where, precisely. Silhouettes cut in Salem appear at auctions frequently, but I’m not sure these would count as Salem art as such artists seemed to have been characteristically itinerant.

Folk art painting of Salem Harbor, Eldred’s Auctions; reverse glass painting and allegorical figures, Jeffrey S. Evans & Associations Auctions; Massachusetts cutwork silhouette “of S.P.H. of Salem, cut by S.A.D,” Dovetail Auctions.

Besides the first painting above, my favorite recent folk art finds are twentieth-century creations: a c. 1910 popcorn popper  and a wooden house purse made by Mercedes Hitchcock of Houston, Texas. You can find more about her business, “Houses by Hitchcock,” here. Apparently women from all over the country would send in photographs of their houses to her, and she would make scale model wooden pocketbooks for them! The owner of a Summer Street house commissioned a purse, and it came up for auction a few years ago. I’ve got to go for a walk–not quite sure which house it is. But it’s November, so safe now.

Scary Salem Popcorn Popper, c. 1910; Mercedes Hitchcock Folk Art Wooden Salem House Purse, Fairfield Auction; Salem Popcorn Popper, Bray & Co. Auctions.

 

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July 28, 2025

I’m Confused by Pineapples

By daseger

This is one of those “writing it out” posts. It starts out with confusion in the hope that I can work it out, but I may not so it might end in confusion as well. I’m confused about the symbolism of pineapples. Of course everyone knows that pineapples represent “hospitality,” but do they really? What else might they represent? I started out with the question as to whether pineapples are Colonial or Colonial Revival, and it seems that that they are both. I’m also wondering if there are differences in what they represent in the northern US as opposed to the south, and between the US and the UK. My wonder is prompted by recent road trips down south, where I saw a lot of pineapples, as well as an interest in symbolism in general prompted by the recent discussions here in Salem over our official city seal, which some see as stereotypical and rascist and others see as evocative of a proud global maritime heritage. I always find that a historical perspective helps with understanding both images and events; apparently the members of the Task Force charged with examing the seal do not. In any case, there’s always a personal and arbitrary angle: it’s so interesting that different people see very different things in the same image. And that is true of pineapples too: while for the most part they seem to convey a sense of decorative hospitality, they also have associations with exoticism and exclusivity and excess, colonization, plantations (both in the West Indies and Hawaii), coerced labor and ultimately slavery. I am always interested in Salem’s famed “Pineapple House,” a Georgian structure first located on Brown Street and then removed to Brown Street Court which was demolished by 1911 with only its pineapple-pedimented door preserved, first in the Essex Institute and now in the American galleries at the Peabody Essex Museum. I’ve written about it before, but I know more now: its pineapple was not a local creation but rather a British import and its importer, Captain Thomas Poynton, became one of Salem first Loyalistist refugees, leaving his house (and his wife!) for England in 1775. That conspicuous (always gilded by all accounts) pineapple might have had Tory associations in Revolutionary Salem, but nevertheless it became the inspiration for one of Salem’s most important Tercentenary expressions, the band stand on Salem Common erected in 1926.

There are pineapple motifs on New England furniture and wallpapers from the 18th century through the mid-twentieth, but in terms of conspicuous architectural detail I think the best examples are the Hunter House in Newport, RI and the Wentworth-Gardner House in Portsmouth, NH (after Salem’s Pineapple House, of course). The Hunter House was also owned by a prominent Loyalist, and a recent article on its new Orientation Gallery describes its current interpretation as a  “paradigm shift”: Here visitors can examine a historic photograph of the house’s pineapple pediment alongside a silver coffee pot and a pair of covered baskets adorned with pineapple finials. The display discusses the tropical fruit as a product of colonization and slavery as well as a symbol of wealth and hospitality in colonial Newport. For the Preservation Society, which long ago adopted the pineapple as part of its logo, this analysis represents a paradigm shift. It’s been a few years since I’ve been on a tour, but I don’t think this kind of deep dive is offered up at the Wentworth Gardner House in Portsmouth, which was restored by none other than Colonial Revival evangelist and entrepreneur Wallace Nutting in 1916-18. And there’s no need, as Nutting added the pedimented pineapple, and the entire entrance surround to the house. This very Colonial Revival pineapple anticipated the ever-present fruit emblems at another prominent Colonial-esque institution: Colonial Williamsburg.

And down south, it’s the same thing: there are eighteenth-century pineapples and then there is a twentieth-century pineapple revival. Virginia’s oldest plantation, Shirley, has a very prominent three-foot-tall pineapple right at the apex of the roof of its main house, which was built around the same time as the Poynton House in Salem and the Hunter House in Newport.  Installing a pineapple on the pinnacle of one’s roof must have been a James River Plantation thing, as Brandon Plantation has one as well. Another interesting transatlantic pineapple connection relates to the last Colonial Governor of Virginia, John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore, who commissioned a stone-carved pineapple summerhouse for his Scottish estate in 1761, likely the most famous pineapple construction in the world. The pineapple is very prominent in Charleston, of course, with the pineapple gateposts (which I think were supposed to be pinecones?) of the Simmons-Edwards House dating from around 1816 and the famous pineapple fountain dating from 1990.

Shirley and Brandon Plantations in Virginia; The Dunmore Pineapple, Stirlingshire, Scotland via the National Trust for Scotland; Gate at the Simmons-Edwards House at 14 Legare Street, Charleston, built 1816, from the lovely site Glimpses of Charleston; some pineapple images from one of my favorite books, Charleston Style, by Susan Sully with photographs by John Blais.

Pineapples on the gatepost (and I suppose by extension the very popular pineapple doorknocker) are said to be visual “traditions” based on the practice of ship captains returning from exotic realms displaying pineapples on their properties to indicate that they were home, and ready to receive visitors. This story is repeated again and again and again, but I don’t seem to find any references to it before the early twentieth century. I think it’s more Colonial Revival romance. Pineapple stories just keep getting repeated with very little insight, analysis or research, at least over here. With the exception of the Newport Preservation and a Smithsonian blog post about the “prickly” history of the pineapple, these storied fruits (and their visualizations) don’t have much cultural depth over here in the US: and if they are in fact emblems I think they should have more. But in the UK, wow! Here’s a great History Workshop piece with all sorts of associations, and very recently, a “sinister history of the pineapple” student project at the University of Southampton in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew was featured in Dezeen. My research for this post exposed me to yet another pineapple association: apparently an upside-down pineapple sign on a door means means there are swingers within! That’s a long way from friendly sea captains, and obviously there’s much more to pineapples than meets the eye (but I’m still confused).

Dezeen Magazine, July 26, 2025: A “Sign of Status” by Jas Jones, who concludes “the pineapple is no innocent fruit.”

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June 9, 2025

Summerlands

By daseger

I am just back from a very festive wedding in Mexico, blitzed and therefore completely incapable of presenting a proper post. But I have been saving up some images by Jazz Age commercial artist John Held, Jr. (1889-1958) for a while, and today seems like the perfect time to put them out there. Held’s popular flapper images, appearing as magazine cover and content illustrations throughout the 1920s, are a perfect representation of their age, but it was his pictorial maps which first caught my eye. I also like the posters he created for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, enticing travelers to locations all around New England and beyond, northward, the same direction my travels will take me this summer. No more south, except for Rhode Island and maybe Connecticut! Held used the term “Vacationland” several times in his New Haven posters, but I never liked that term while growing up in Maine so I streamlined his alternative “Summer Play Land” for a more timeless title.

Travel Posters by John Held Jr. from Artsy and Swann Auction Galleries Archives.

Held was a wonderful illustrator but his work cannot be confined to that genre; even though he published over 100 cartoons in the New Yorker in the 1920s and 1930s he can’t be identified exclusively as a cartoonist either. He worked in many mediums: watercolor, ink drawings, engraving, woodblock prints, even sculpture. On several of his fanciful maps, he refers to himself as a cartographer, and he wrote as well as illustrated. In his commercial heyday in the 1920s he was reportedly the highest-paid graphic artist in America but his commissions declined and fortunes failed with the Depression. So he seems to define (some critics even say document) an era even as a moved on to less popular (flapper-less) artistic expressions. Many of his engravings and prints have an intentional primitivism that makes them almost timeless in my view, among them several Salem ships.

Cape Cod poster, 1931, David Pollack Vintage Posters; Ships by John Held, Syracuse University Museum; Ship Bonetta of Salem Departing from Leghorn, William Bunch Auctions & Apraisals.

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December 2, 2024

Watercolor Dining Rooms

By daseger

I love dining rooms in general and my dining room in particular; I love renderings of dining rooms in general and watercolor renderings of dining rooms in particular: that’s pretty much the post! In the Victorian house I grew up in, the dining room did double duty as a sitting room of sorts, while my first Greek Revival house had an open kitchen/dining area. But my present house has a room that can be nothing other than a dining room and it’s my favorite room in the house. Dining rooms seem to be in danger of disappearing now, and I really hope that trend reverses itself.

My Thanksgiving dining room with and without a watercolor filter—definitely not very artistic!

My regard for dining rooms has artistic rather than social origins: I love all the things associated with dining rather than the act of dining. And when I was relatively young—in high school I think—I came across the paintings of English artist Mary Ellen Best (1809-1891), who painted her interior worlds with such charm and detail that they became imprinted in my mind. Her dining room in York remains one of my favorites: she also painted her family dining at the home of her grandmother and an elderly neighbor in her dining room. Best opened window after window into mid-nineteenth-century interiors in both England and Germany, where she lived after her marriage. We see kitchens, parlors, and drawing rooms in intimate detail: her use of watercolor gives these rooms a dreamy effect so we’re not too overwhelmed.

A very different artist, of another time and place, was Edgar W. Jenney, an architect and interior designer who retired to Nantucket in the 1920s. He offers more of a preservation prespective in his interior renderings of old Nantucket houses, large and small, but he was also a commercial artist: I first came across him when I saw his very Colonial Revival “Salem Room” in an old House and Garden. He seems much more focused on the overall ambiance than the details of daily life we see in Best’s paintings, but watercolor softens his scenes.

Two Nantucket dining rooms, 1930s,  by Edgar Whitefield Jenney, Rafael Osana Auctions and Nantucket Historical Society.

All of the above are artistic compositions, but watercolor was used for professional renderings as well so you can find some lovely paper dining rooms in trade catalogs published by wallpaper, fabric, and furniture companies in particular: there are myriad sources at the Internet Archive’s Building Heritage Technology Library. Architectural and Interior Design archives are another obvious source for these images: I was introduced to the wonderful work of Wisconsin interior decorator Odin J. Oyen here which led me to the first stunning dining room design below here. These kind of searches can go on for days and even weeks so be careful! Work interfered or I would have kept on going.

Two dining room elevation renderings from Historic New England’s Collections from Irving & Casson/A.H. Davenport. A dining room from Mary Brooks Picken’s Sewing for the Home (1941) and a Baltimore dining room from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Homes of Our Ancestors (1925).

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February 14, 2024

St. Valentine’s Day Comes to Salem

By daseger

So many Valentine’s Day posts! But I never wondered how this holiday was first observed in Salem until I came across an interesting newspaper article from the Salem Gazette in 1823. I just love the description of American “coolness of reason, devotion to secular business, and freedom from superstition” as contrasted with a more passionate England. This was nearly twenty years before the arrival of the uniform penny post in the UK, after which Charles Dickens and his editor W.H. Wills would write of the onslaught of “sacrifices” to St. Valentine, “consisting of hearts, darts, Cupid peeping out of paper-roses, Hymen embowered in hot-pressed embossing, swains in very blue coats and nymphs in very opaque muslin, coarse caricatures and tender verses” passing through the post offices of Great Britain on February 14 in Household Words (March 30, 1850).

Salem Gazette, February 14, 1823.

Several years before Dickens addressed these copious British valentines, one of them made its way to the Worcester, Massachusetts home of Esther Howland, who was inspired to make her own with her original designs and the materials sold in her father’s stationary store, thus beginning the commercial valentine industry in America. Worcester was the center of this industry for a century, aided by US postal reforms. The valentine story is really a Worcester story, not a Salem story, but it’s interesting to see how quickly Salem stationers picked up this trade. They were not innovators like Howland or her successors, but they jumped on board very quickly, offering a variety of valentines from various suppliers by the late 1840s, as well as materials for those who wanted to craft their own.

Salem Observer, January 29, 1848 and Salem Register, February 9, 1849.

If you search for the word “valentine” in databases of Salem newspapers you will get references to the names of various people, to the Saint, or to Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Fair Maid of Perth (or St. Valentine’s Day) before the 1840s and afterwards, almost exclusively to the holiday and its tokens. That “coolness of reason” observed in 1823 seems to have been abandoned relatively quickly, but Valentine’s Day was certainly not a religious holiday nor one based on “superstition”. And in antebellum Salem and elsewhere, it seems like an observance more than ready to burst out of Salem stationers’ shops.

 

Vintage valentines from c. 1890-1910 from the Mount Holyoke Valentines Collection ,assembled in memory of that famous Mount Holyoke graduate, Esther Howland.

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August 21, 2023

Salem’s Wooden Watchman

By daseger

Before there was Samuel McIntire, there was Lemon Beadle. Remember that name: Salem’s nineteenth-century antiquarians certainly wanted us to. Sometimes “Lemuel” is the spelling, but I’m going with Lemon, because Lemon Beadle!  On this past Thursday I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley, source of most of Salem’s history in textual and material form, to look at some sources for the history of Town House Square, the subject of the last piece I have to write for our Salem’s Centuries book. I had ordered up a notebook entitled “Salem Estates and Localities 1629-1842” which included a “Chronological Chart of Churches in Salem, Mass.” mostly because I wanted to look at the latter (and it is pretty great). The notebook consitutes the notes of William Phineas Upham, the son of  Charles Upham, the first great historian of the Salem Witch Trials. William, who prepared what must be one of the most important maps in American history (perhaps an overstatement, but I live in Salem), a 1692 view of Salem Village for his father, was clearly gathering information for his own magnum opus. The notebook was filled with extraordinary detail about many structures in Salem, illustrated occasionally with marginalia drawings of little houses. I found it charming and informative, but not particularly relevant to my topic, and I was about to close it and move on when I came to William’s rather compelling depiction of Salem’s central 18th century watch house, with its life-sized watchman on top, carved by Lemon Beadle. 

From Phillips Library Fam. Mss. 1047, Salem Estates and Localities, 1629-1842 by William P. Upham.

This illustration really intrigued me: could the “soldier” (as Upham calls it above) or “watchman” (according to other sources) really have been that big? Were there any other depictions out there? Sadly, I have found none so far, but I did get more details from a variety of old Salem sources. This particular watch house was likely Salem’s second, and it was built on Schoolhouse Lane, later School Street and the present-day Washington Street, in 1712: the carved wooden figure on its roof bore the date Anno Regina 1712 in large gold letters. If it was not conspicuous enough, town records indicate the watchman/soldier was painted in 1725. Lemon Beadle was chosen for the commission because of his experience crafting figureheads, and the entire production seems to have been part of policy to improve and standardize the watch system and remind Salem men of their civic responsibilities. While real watchmen endured into the nineteenth century, I’m pretty sure that was not the case with their wooden representative; there are the references to the watch house’s survival fifty years after its construction, but that’s it. Upham clearly wanted to “see” and portray it in his notebook, along with its adjacent whipping post.

Upham’s whipping post and other Salem structures; a watchman by Albert Blaisdell; Salem printer Ezekiel Russell’s watch order, 1777, Sang Collection via Sotheby’s;  Salem Gazette.

Since my focus is on the watchman statue, I’m a little out of my depth and discipline, but I did find one text which asserted that Lemon Beadle’s work is “the first documentable piece of free-standing sculpture in Massachusetts” (Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630-1730: An Interpretive Catalogue, 1988). That’s a pretty big claim; I wonder if it’s still standing. Elias Hasket Derby commissioned woodcarvers John and Simeon Skillen to carve four “free standing figures of larger dimensions, ranging between 4 and 5 feet in height” for his summer estate near the end of the century, but I have to say that without a more detailed depiction, Upham’s watchman sketch reminds me more of the……….(searching for correct word here, can’t come up with anything really applicable) rather less elegant figures which “graced” the very notorious Timothy Dexter’s estate in Newburyport. There were 40, including one of Dexter himself, and the Reverend William Bentley was not impressed when he visited in 1803: “There is no horrid violation of proportion in the district objects but the vast columns, the gigantic figures, the extended arches, & absurd confusion of characters, tend to convince us of the abuse of riches….Dexter was within doors, drunk, having just suffered from a heavy beating from his drunken son, urged on by a drunken daughter.”

 I have no doubt that Lemon Beadle could have done better.

 John Rubens Smith (engraver), A View of the Mansion of the late LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER in High Street, Newburyport, 1810.

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August 6, 2022

Are Hollyhocks Colonial or Colonial Revival?

By daseger

And now for a really important question, but about all I can take on during these dog days of summer: are hollyhocks Colonial or Colonial Revival? The hollyhocks were simply beautiful and characteristically statuesque at the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site when we stopped by on the way back from Vermont a few weeks ago and I started thinking about them. Hollyhocks don’t look like a particularly useful plant but they are on the cover of so many books on “Colonial” gardens published at the beginning of the twentieth centuy: they seem to be the very symbol of the Colonial Revival garden (along with the sundial and the arbor). So what’s the story, Colonial or Colonial Revival?

Hollyhocks in Cornish, NH and on the cover of early 20th centuy gardening books: Shelton (1906); Ely (1903); Bennett (1919); McCauley (1911); “Colonial” woman and hollyhocks in font of the John Ward House, Salem in a c. 1911 photo by Mary Harrod Northend; layout for a Colonial Garden from Colonial gardens; the landscape architecture of George Washington’s time (1932).

So as you can see, hollyhocks were a mainstay in the “old-fashioned” gardens of the Colonial Revival era, but were they actually revived? Were they also present in gardens from centuries prior? I think that the answer is a qualified yes: hollyhocks were both Colonial and Colonial Revival, but the hollyhocks of the earlier era were a bit different than that of the latter. When horticultural authors in the early modern England referenced hollyhocks (which they spelled in many different ways, believe me), they meant Althea officinalis or what we call Marsh Mallow today. Marsh Mallow is a great old plant that I used to have in my garden but it disappeared last year. All mallows were utilized for their soothing effects, and John Winthrop included them in his order for “garden seeds” dispatched to London in 1631. The hollyhock in particular seems to have been an Asian variety brought west in the wake of the Crusades, and while it is often said that the naturalist William Turner fashioned the name hollyhock (or holyoke) in his 1551 Newe Herball, it dates from the fourteenth century at the very least. Turner’s Herball contained woodcut illustrations copied directly from the lovely colored engravings of Leonhard Fuch’s De Historia Stirpium (1543), and he also followed Fuchs in giving hollyhocks the scientific name Malva hortensis. The Fuchs illustration is below: as you can see, it is definitely a familiar hollyhock, but noticeably smaller than our modern variety. And that’s what happened to the Hollyhock: it was improved through hybridization in the nineteenth century. Malva hortensis became Althea Rosea and ultimately Alcea Rosea. The Boston nurseryman John Breck, author of the influential The Flower Garden or Breck’s Flowers (1851), disdained the popular dahlia and promoted the humble hollyhock, as a great improvement has been made in this old-fashioned, ordinary flower, within a few years, that has brought it before the public under a new phase; and it now bids fair to become as popular as many other flowers have been when taken in hand by the florist. Breck was referring to the cross-breeding success of his colleague across the Atlantic, Saffron Walden nurseryman William Chater, who had produced double hollyhocks with large flowers, “of better form, more substance in the petal, and more decided in colour.” And thus the hollyhook took off, its success limited only by the onset of a rusty disease that is still with us, unfortunately.

Sixteenth- and nineteenth-century hollyhocks: Wellcome Images; George Baxter’s print of Valentine Bartholomew’s Hollyhocks (1857), Victoria & Albert Museum.

Another major factor in the increasing popularity of the hollyhock must have been the many artistic depictions appearing on both side of the Atlantic from the 1870s: painters of all artistic schools, from impressionism to realism, painted stunning and soaring hollyhocks, often in the company of women. I could include hundreds of such paintings in this post, but I’ve limited myself to just a few of my favorite works. I’ve started out with Ross Sterling Turner’s Hollyhocks from 1876 because he is a Salem artist, but it’s not as representative as a painting fom the very same year by another New England artist, Eastman Johnson. Girls and hollyhocks just go together! It’s no wonder that the garden writers of the next decades, among them so many women, favored them. Hollyhocks were also a framing device, as Childe Hassam demonstrated in his many depictions of his friend Celia Thaxter’s garden on the Isle of Shoals in the 1890s (reproduced in An Island Garden in 1894): they could define an entrance, a view, or even the gardener herself. My favorite depiction of hollyhocks is in Abbot Fuller Graves’ painting Portsmouth Doorway (1910) at the Peabody Essex Museum, but everybody else’s impressionist over-the-top hollyhocks with a woman-in-white work seems to be Frederick Carl Friesek’s Hollyhocks from the following year.

Ross Sterling Turner, Hollyhocks (1876), LA County Museum of Art; Eastman Johnson, Hollyhocks (1876), New Britain Museum of American Art; Childe Hassam, In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in her Garden) (1892); Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Abbot Fuller Graves, Portsmouth Doorway (1910), Peabody Essex Museum; Frederick Carl Frieseke, Hollyhocks (1911), National Academy of Design.

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July 31, 2022

A July Afternoon, Old Lyme

By daseger

One hot morning last week I was looking at some paintings by the American Impressionist artist Matilda Browne (1869-1947) when I realized I wanted to see more. It was apparent that the best place to do that was the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, so I hopped in the car and drove down there, arriving in the early afternoon. I was supposed to be doing lots of other things but I ran (drove) away instead: I’m a firm believer in doing that from time to time and have always been grateful that I have the ways and means to do so. Old Lyme is a beautiful town: I’ve been there quite a few times but never to the Griswold Museum, and it was a real feast for the senses, especially at this time of the year, when the Colonial Revival garden in back of Miss Griswold’s mansion was at midsummer peak. There is the 1817 mansion, embellished with the art of Miss Griswold’s artist-boarders who established the Old Lyme Art Colony at the beginning of the twentieth century, the garden and grounds with trails along the Lieutenant River, the modern gallery with cafe and gift shop, and several studio-outbuildings which give the impression of an artistic community past and present. It was a perfect place to spend an afternoon in July, as everything was bathed in that golden midsummer glow, much like the painting by once-resident Edward Simmons of the same title. And I saw lots of Matilda Brown’s paintings too.

Edward Simmons’ July Afternoon, Old Lyme (1906) and the house, garden and grounds of the Florence Griswold Museum.

Florence Griswold’s life (1850-1937) was in some ways common, in other ways not. She was born into a wealthy family, exemplified by the grand 1817 mansion on Old Lyme’s main street, whose money was increasingly diminished to just the house and grounds with no means to keep both. After the death of her father in the 1870s, the house was transformed into a school for genteel ladies, and after the death of her mother in the 1890s, into a boarding house by Florence and her sister. The artist Henry Ward Ranger came to stay in 1899, and convinced other artists to follow suit in the years to come, and the house evolved into an artistic community with Miss Griswold very much in its center and her house the foundation of an emerging art colony in Old Lyme. Apparently extending patronage (in the form of credit) to artists became a higher priority than holding on to the family home, and she lost it before her death in 1937, but over the next decade the Florence Griswold Association was able to purchase it and establish the museum. The first floor of the house is maintained much as it was in her time, while the second floor has galleries devoted to the work produced there, including paintings of the house itself, illustrating her role as “the keeper of the artists.” Resident artists, including Matilda Browne, also painted the house itself, most prominently its door and mantle panels, leaving their mark in more ways than one. While the Old Lyme Art Colony is associated most prominent with American Impressionism because of the residency of Childe Hassam and others, you can also see works representative of the less well-known (at least to me!) school of Tonalism associated with Ranger. And there are also some very impressive cows.

ABOVE: Matilda Brown, Miss Florence’s; Charles P. Gruppe, The Griswold House at Old Lyme; Woodhull Adams, Miss Florence’s Parlor (1912); painted panels in the Griswold dining room. BELOW: Front hall and parlor of the Griswold House, Miss Griswold’s bedroom and a guest bedroom.

It was quite a shift to move from the mellow tones and painterly animals ensconced in the old Griswold House to the museum’s modern galleries, which are currently showcasing a retrospective of artist Dana Sherwood’s more whimsical work, including an installed Bedroom Bestiary (2021) below. Very charming images, but I wanted to stay in the past, as usual, and in the garden, which was lush, lush, lush. So back to Miss Griswold’s environment I went: to the realm of her boarders and borders. It was Matilda Browne who lured me to coastal Connecticut after all.

Works by Dana Sherwood in the 2002 Krieble Gallery; Matilda Browne’s Clark Voorhees House (1905) and Saltbox by Moonlight; William Henry Howe’s Repose, September Days in Normandy (1888-89); back in the garden—somehow I never thought of using sage as a border plant like this.

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October 24, 2021

Teaching with Holbein

By daseger

A new exhibition featuring the works of Hans Holbein the Younger opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum this week, and it will be traveling to the Morgan Library and Museum after the new year. It happens that this very week Holbein was very much on my mind: various of his works had popped up, as they always do, in several of my classes, and he appears in reference and image in the proofs for my forthcoming book as well. I have always depended on Holbein: his images have enabled me to illustrate so many aspects and avenues of my teaching fields, from the Renaissance to the Reformation to the Scientific Revolution and everything in between. His 1533 masterpiece The Ambassadors is a visual key to all three topics, and I generally devote an entire class to it.

National Gallery, London.

I’m not that special: anyone armed with the essential knowledge of the era’s cultural history could turn The Ambassadors into a class: there’s just so much in it and to it! This particular painting is not included in the Getty exhibition, but each and every Holbein painting has a tale to tell, even if it’s just a singular portrait with (deceptively) little embellishment. I suppose Holbein is best known for his paintings of the Tudor Court, and the exhibition includes the portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Richard Southwell as well as one of my favorites, that of Mary, Lady Guildford, the wife of Henry VIII’s comptroller, Sir Henry Guildford. Holbein was a great painter of women in general, and “capturing their character” (the subtitle of the exhibition) in particular, but I do wonder why he chose the stern Lady Guildford rather than the more amused one captured in one of the studies for the portrait. In either case, you can easily see that both Lady Guildfords are far from the serene Renaissance ladies we generally see: they are feisty and fun.

Frick Collection, St. Louis Art Museum and Kunstmuseum Basel; The Getty Exhibition.

Of course, students love the gossipy history of Henry VIII and his six wives, of which at least two were painted by Holbein. Students love anecdotes, and Holbein allows you to illustrate them. But you’ve got to be careful: an anecdote can be a dangerous thing, remembered better than the larger issue/trend/event it is designed to illustrate. A case in point is the “story” behind Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves, painted when he was dispatched to Germany to render a likeness as Henry was considering the Protestant princess for his fourth bride in 1539. The story goes that Holbein was so charmed by Anne that he made her more attractive than she really was, thereby convincing Henry to go along with the marriage by proxy only to declare “I like her not!” and seek an annulment the moment he laid eyes on her in England. I don’t think Holbein had time to be charmed by Anne, and we can see that he lavished more attention on her dress than her face in the portrait. In any case, Thomas Cromwell the courtier, diplomat, and by now manifest Protestant had far more influence over the German marriage, and he lost his head over it in the next year.

Jane Seymour (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien), Anne of Cleves (The Louvre), and (perhaps) Katherine Howard (Royal Collection Trust).

The royal portraits are not included in the Getty exhibition, but there are several striking portraits of Tudor courtiers that I’m looking forward to seeing in person, including that of Southwell and an anonymous falconer or Portrait of a Gentleman with a Hawk. I also love Holbein’s portraits of merchants, who characterize his era in so many ways, and there are several in the exhibition though not my favorite, the Portrait of Georg Giese. It’s all in the details: Holbein enables us to grasp the practice of various endeavors with his little slips of papers, instruments and objects. He amplified the importance of literacy in his age as well as the ars nova of printing by including so many words in his paintings (so perfectly rendered: see Bonifacius Amerbach in the exhibition), engaging in printmaking himself, and designing printers’ devices and ornamental title pages. With Holbein we can also explore the roles of the Renaissance public intellectuals like Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the latter represented in the exhibition by both Holbein’s portrait and the title page engraving by Albrecht Dürer based on it. All of this is fairly straightforward stuff: I haven’t even delved into the next layer of Renaissance symbolism, in lavish display in many of Holbein’s works. Layers and layers of images, words, and meanings.

Portrait of a Gentleman with a Hawk, Mauritshuis; Portrait of Georg Giese, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Bonifacius Amerbach and device of printer Johannes Froben, Kunstmuseum Basel; the exhibition catalog, Holbein: Capturing Character, edited by Anne T. Woollett.

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