Tag Archives: Art

July 22, 2012

A Swarm of Bees in July

By daseger

According to the old English nursery rhyme: A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly. Even if we could muster enough bees in these days of ever-dwindling bee populations, apparently it’s too late in the season for a regenerating swarm. Nevertheless, there still seem to be bees around, in my garden, on the streets of Salem, and in my bookmark folder labeled interesting insects. So it’s a good time to showcase most of the above.

For the past few years, the city of Salem has been initiating public art projects, and this year the goal is all about transforming mundane surfaces into works of art.  All the utility boxes around town have been painted, and my favorite is the “bee box” near the intersection of Essex and Summer Streets: here we have a real swarm, or at least a utilitarian representation of one.

I think bees are on everyone’s minds now that their numbers are in decline, but in fact representations of them go way back: the royal associations, their industrious and organizational nature, and the fact that they were the source of Europe’s native sweetener made them very conspicuous insects in western culture.  Sometimes they even seem to transcend insect-hood, or at the very least represent all of insect-hood, as in God made the birds and the bees.

Some medieval bees:  pollinating, confronting a bear, and making honey:

British Library MSS Harley 3244 (after 1236), Harley 3448 (15th century) and Sloane 4016 (c. 1440).

Bees were big in the early modern era, as their role in pollination was universally known and expensive imported sugar could not fulfill the demand for sweet treats. They also became, very notably, the subjects of the first publication of empirical observations made with one of the revolutionary instruments of the era, the microscope, in Federico Cesi’s and Francesco Stelluti’s Apiarium (1625; detail below).  In England, all of the practical gardening manuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth century contain sections on bee-keeping; it seems to be a natural component of cultivation, not a specialization by any means. Sometimes women are the designated bee-keepers, sometimes men.  There were also books focused particularly on bee cultivation and bee culture, like John Levett’s classic Ordering of Bees (1634, below) as well as satirical allegories like John Day’s Parliament of Bees (perhaps 1607, but not printed until 1641). Given that bees live in a matriarchy as well as their general nature and attributes, I’ve always wondered why Elizabeth never made more iconographical use of them; perhaps it was too patently obvious.

Centuries later, Napoleon had no such subtlety: he used bee motifs to project legitimacy for his very new regime.  The bee enabled him to project royalty–as it was associated with France’s very first royal dynasty, the Merovingians, and with France’s early medieval emperor, Charlemagne–while disassociating himself with the fleur-de-lys-bearing Bourbons whom he displaced.

Bonaparte among the Bees:  portraits of Napoleon by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson  (after 1804) and Jacques-Louis David (1812; National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Bees were too universal and essential to be stigmatized by their association with Napoleon, and after his fall they became an important decorative motif in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appearing on textiles, ceramics, and jewelry, and in many illustrations and lithographs. At the same time, this very industrious era produced several key innovations in bee-keeping, most notably Langstroth’s movable frame hive, bringing about a revolution in the management of bees. Art, science, and industry were inextricably connected when it came to bees, and I haven’t even touched on advertising.

Wedgwood Sugar Caster, early 19th century, and French bonnet veil, c. 1860, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; illustration from Brockhaus Konversations-Lexicon : allgemeine deutsche Real-Encyklopädie. (Leipzig : F.A. Brockhaus, 1883-1887), New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Of course bees continue to be inspirational for artists, designers, and crafters.  Given that the bee population is declining at an alarming rate (30%!!!), I hope that their ongoing popularity is not merely a sentimental urge.  There are too many items emblazoned with bees to showcase here, but I am drawn to British ceramicist Fenella Smith‘s bee mugs and jugs, which you don’t see everywhere (yet).

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Nature

July 16, 2012

Master Remix

By daseger

There’s an interesting exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum this summer featuring some of the major works of George Deem, an artist who mastered painting the masters–in his own variant ways.  Deem (1932-2008) was so fascinated with the works of Mantegna, Caravaggio, Matisse, Picasso, and most especially Vermeer, that he repainted them in an engaging manner that not only plays with art–but also with time.  The exhibition, entitled George Deem:  the Art of Art History, features 30 paintings that focus on Deem’s re-worked and re-imagined Vermeers as well as those of several eminent American artists, like the provocative School of Sargent, below.

George Deem, School of Sargent (1986).  Private Collection, Stamford, CT.

I find this painting particularly captivating:  it really looks like Madame Gautreau is gazing at The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit and they back at her!  Odd to have such iconic ladies in the same picture together. Another Deem take on the Boit girls is below, along with George Washington and his Portrait (1972), based on the Gilbert Stuart portrait. I really like both the idea and the image of this painting.

George Deem, George Washington and his Portrait (1972).  Collection of the Boston Athenaeum; Sargent Vermeer (2007).  Private Collection, Hartford, CT.

Living in an expansionistic age, Johannes Vermeer incorporated maps into the backgrounds of several of his paintings and Deem brings the map into the foreground in Vermeer’s Map and the near-foreground in A Stool, a Chair, and a Map, and a few other Vermeer-inspired paintings.

George Deem, Vermeer’s Map (1982).  Private Collection, Falls Church, Virginia; A Stool, a Chair, and a Map (2003). Estate of George Deem.

As one who has spent lots of time drinking in every little detail of Vermeer paintings, I can understand Deem’s obsession with Vermeer (about whom he has also written a book: How to Paint a Vermeer:  a Painter’s History of Art, 2004) and it is fun to see these background details (like The Red Chair, below) fill the frame.

George Deem, The Red Chair (2002).  Private Collection, West Hartford, CT.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture

July 7, 2012

A Pioneering Photographer

By daseger

As part of its year-long focus on photography, the Peabody Essex Museum here in Salem is currently showing an exhibition (through October 8) of Ansel Adams’ images called At the Water’s Edge. The pictures are striking, of course, but I think I’ve seen too many Ansel Adams photographs in my life:  there’s a familiarity that is dulling the artistry for me.  Nevertheless, the thematic focus on water, the juxtaposition of small and HUGE photographs, and the sheer number of images on view makes the exhibition well worth seeing.

Ansel Adams,  Reflections at Mono Lake, California, 1948.

There must be room for one more exhibition in this “year of photography” so I am wondering whose work the PEM will showcase next. With the Jerry Uelsmann exhibit in the spring and the Adams exhibit on view this summer, we have been exposed to the work of two eminent twentieth-century photographers; for the last exhibit of the year, I’d like to see some earlier work.  My suggestion:  Salem-born Samuel Masury (c 1818-1874), a pioneering American daguerreotypist and photographer whose studio produced one of the most celebrated photographic portraits of the nineteenth century:  the “Ultima Thule” portrait of Edgar Allen Poe, taken just days after the author’s failed suicide attempts and less than a year before his death.

Samuel Masury (as drawn by Winslow Homer) in 1859 and Edgar Allen Poe in 1848:  this image was taken at the studio of Masury and F.W. Hartshorn in Providence, Rhode Island by their camera operator, Edwin H. Manchester.  Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

Masury had learned the new art from Boston daguerreotypist John Plumbe in Boston in the early 1840s and by 1843 he had established a studio on Essex Street in Salem, offering daguerreotype miniatures, “in a new and elegant style, and of larger sizes than are generally taken.  MINIATURES taken at this gallery are warranted to give perfect satisfaction, and not to fade or change appearance in any way, or for any number of years. As many persons suppose that Daguerreotype Miniatures can only be taken in fair weather, I beg leave to say that, by a recent discovery, I am prepared to take Miniatures in cloudy weather, and will warrant  as good pictures taken in cloudy, as in pleasant weather.” (Salem Gazette, June 1, 1847).  Masury was always “discovering”:  new processes and techniques, new locations, new subjects, and he seemed to have “pop-up” studios in several northeastern cities. After traveling to France to learn the latest glass negative process he returned to America and set up a large Boston studio in partnership with G.M. Silsbee, and proceeded to turn out a variety of images:  many carte-de-visite cards, which must have been the bread and butter of this fledgling industry, but also architectural and landscape views.  The versatility of his subject matter is represented by the images below:  an extraordinary pair of cdv cards of Francis L. Clayton/Clalin, a cross-dressing female solider who served in the Union Army under the name of “Jack Williams”, and an early landscape looking towards the water, taken at the Loring Estate in Beverly in 1859. Clearly the meeting of water and land was as inspirational to the first generation of photographers as it was to their successors.

Francis. L. Clayton in uniform and a dress, 1863-64, Library of Congress; Early View from the Dell, 1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem

July 2, 2012

Playing with Fire

By daseger

Francis Bacon heralded the compass, printing, and gunpowder as the three European (really Chinese) inventions that changed the world, but he also had words of praise for another Renaissance (Chinese) innovation:  fireworks. Like gunpowder, fireworks represented the Promethean feat of his age:  stealing fire from heaven, and in both his Essays (1612; “On Masques”) and The New Atlantis (1627) he references the achievement:  we represent also ordinance and instruments of war, and engines of all kinds: and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gun–powder, wild–fires burning in water, and unquenchable. Also fire–works of all variety both for pleasure and use.

I’m not sure what the recommended use of fireworks was besides pleasure, but I thought I’d indulge in a brief (and very Eurocentric) illustrated history of fireworks for the beginning of our July 4th week.  As always, when I compare the past and present, I’m struck by the artfulness of the former:  fireworks displays from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century seem to have been as much focused on a flagrant display of machines on the ground as light in the sky. As evidence, look at the elaborate seventeenth-century (Italian, of course) creation below, and an illustration from John Babington’s Pyrotechnia.

Engraving by Lodovico Ottavio Burnacini (1636-1707), courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum, London; John Babington, Pyrotechnia (1635), courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library.

Fireworks demonstrations in Europe are first recorded in the fifteenth century, so two centuries later they are not quite the marvel they once were and the “pyrotechnists” had to stage ever-more elaborate displays in order to impress at every royal and national event:  weddings, coronation, victories in battles and wars. Views of London fireworks celebrating the English victory at the Battle of Boyne in Ireland in 1690 and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in April of 1749 are below;  the latter celebration definitely had its highs and lows. The high was the first performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, while the “low” was a firework-sparked fire which burned the central pavilion to the ground, accompanied by a swordfight between the pyrotechnist-architect of the performance, Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni, and the organizer of the event, the Duke of Montagu.

Night-time fireworks celebrating William III’s victory at the Battle of Boyne, 1690, British Museum; two views of the fireworks and fireworks pavilion celebrating the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, April 27, 1749, British Library and Victoria & Albert Museum.

In the nineteenth century, fireworks celebrations look a bit more recognizable (boring), so I’m going to shift to ephemera and fireworks-related items.  From either end of the century, some great British trade cards and a beautiful cover of Lippincott’s Magazine by Will Carqueville.

Trade cards from the British Museum and British Library; Lippincott’s cover from July 1895, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Back to the art of fireworks for the last century:  Eric Revilious’ amazing fireworks design for Wedgwood, commemorating the 1937 coronation of King George VI on a coffee cup, and a recent photograph by Sarah Anne Johnson.

Eric Revilious mug for Wedgwood, 1937, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Chromogenic print with applied photospotting ink, acrylic ink, gouache, and india ink by Sarah Anne Johnson, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 30, 2012

The 8th Wonder of the World

By daseger

It’s almost shameful to follow up a post on my garden with one that is acknowledged to have been one of the most beautiful in early modern Europe, but be assured I am suggesting no comparison!  A seventeenth-century German garden called the Hortus Palatinus (the Garden of the Palatinate) was so beautiful, so majestic, and such a bold expression of the mastery of nature that contemporaries referred to it as the 8th wonder of the world. Somehow, it’s all the more legendary because it was such a fleeting creation: elaborately planned by French engineer extraordinaire Salomon de Caus for the challenging terrain adjacent to Heidelberg Castle over a five-year period prior to 1619, it was installed that year and perhaps lasted a year or two before becoming a victim of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) that ravaged much of central Europe.  Fortunately the image and elements of the garden were captured in de Caus’s book, entitled Hortus Palatinus, which has been digitized by the University of Heidelberg.

Engraving by Matthäus Merian from the Hortus Palatinus (1620); painting by Jacques Fouquières, circa 1620.

The garden was commissioned by Frederick V, Prince-Elector of the Palatinate and the briefly-reigning “Winter King” of Bohemia, as a romantic tribute to his new bride, Elizabeth Stuart, the eldest daughter of James VI and I of Scotland and England. De Caus, an exiled French Huguenot who was a favorite of the Stuarts and had served as Elizabeth’s tutor, seems to have possessed a variety of talents:  he is mathematician, civil,mechanical, and hydraulic engineer, landscape architect, and horticulturist all at the same time. The Heidelberg garden was not only a schlossgarten carved out of the earth, it was a walled world of waterworks, moving statues, and mechanical birds, all enhancing its wondrous reputation.  So too did its romantic associations:  Frederick and Elizabeth seem to have had that rare royal marriage that was actually based on affection, and the surviving “Elizabeth Gate” , supposedly erected overnight in 1615 on the orders of the Prince-Elector as a surprise gift to his wife, is a living testament to (at least their early) relationship.

Frederick V and Elizabeth, early 17th century line engraving by Balthasar Moncornet, National Portrait Gallery, London; the Elizabeth Gate at Heidelberg.

The ultimate legacy of the garden is de Caus’ 1620 book, published about the same time that its namesake was being destroyed!  The amazing illustrations of Matthäus Merian (among others, apparently) bring us into the garden and its world, and preserves it forever.

More images from the Hortus Palatinus at the University of Heidelberg, and Salomon de Caus’ design for a mechanical bird, from his earlier work,  Les raisons des forces mouvantes (1615).

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Design, History

June 26, 2012

The Pied Piper

By daseger

The Catholic liturgical calendar reveals that today is the day of the martyred saints John and Paul, the day on which (in 1284) several late medieval sources report that a man wearing a multicolored cloak strode into the small town of Hamelin (Hameln) in lower Saxony, and upon the request of the townspeople, took up his pipe and played a tune that lured all of their troublesome rats out of town and to their deaths. The piper returned for his payment, and when rebuffed, went away and then returned yet again, this time wearing the dark green cloak of a hunter.  He picked up his pipe again, and played a tune that lured Hamelin’s children–130 children in all–away, never to return.  And so the piper got his revenge, and a community lost its children for failing to pay its debt.

Engraving by Henry Marsh after John La Farge, 1868, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; 1930 Hameln postcard, Casas-Rodriguez Collection.

Such a dark story, and a source of puzzlement ever since its rediscovery and publication by the Grimm Brothers in the  nineteenth century.  Actually it never really disappeared; there seem to have been variant “rat-catcher” stories in circulation all over central Europe, and even in Scotland.  But the Grimms spread the tale far and wide, and Robert Browning’s 1844 poem made it even more popular.  Given the prominent role played by RATS in the narrative, it is an easy connection between the loss of the children and the momentous mortality of the Black Death, but the chronology doesn’t work:  the story dates to almost a century before the arrival of the plague in Europe.  In any case, the earliest references to the Pied Piper don’t even mention rats; they first appear in the sixteenth-century Zimmern Chronicle. The other references from that century, a time not only of periodic plague but also religious wars and witch hunts, seem to be transforming the piper into either the Devil or the grim reaper, leading the children in a “dance of death”.

The haunting Dance of Death at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal.

Robert Browning’s poem, based on the version of the Pied Piper contained in Nicholas Wanley’s six-volume Wonders of  the Little World; or, A General History of Man (1677), somehow presents a “lighter” version of the story while still maintaining all the dismal details. I think this is because of all the colorful illustrations in the many Browning editions:  by Kate Greenaway (1888), Hope Dunlap (1910), and Margaret Tarrant (1912), among others.  Browning also has a similar “tribe” of people resurfacing in far-east Transylvania, a reference to Ostsiedlung, the eastward migration of the Germans in the high middle ages, a more likely basis for the Pied Piper tale.

As is always the case, folklore serves up useful metaphors to the present, for both social and political commentary. The first half of the twentieth century used the piper for a variety of messages: in two very timely (and different!)  American images, he is leading a pack of criminal and/or radical European immigrants across the sea and a group of children gardeners after World War I, while in Germany, he is a leftist devil, leading the fledgling German republic Into the Abyss.

Anti-immigration and US School Garden Army posters (1909 & 1919), Library of Congress, and “Into the Abyss” poster by Theo Matejko (1919), Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

11 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 25, 2012

Blue Lobsters

By daseger

The rare discovery of a blue lobster by several Rockport lobstermen was all over the Boston news late last week, prompting a search to discover just how rare these crustaceans are.  I kept coming up with the odds of 1 in 2 million, which would indeed make them pretty rare, but I also found bright blue lobsters pulled out of the waters off Ocean City, Maryland last week, two from Canadian waters over the past year, and another off Scotland last year.  Before that, not much news; in fact, the last mention of a blue lobster in Boston was in 1926!  So I am wondering if something is up in the lobster world? Here is the very bright blue–quite aptly referred to as cobalt–Scottish lobster, and an even more rare (1 in 30 million) mutant calico lobster, in the New England Aquarium.

Natural History Museum/Solent

I wish I could blow up this little negative of the 1926 lobster on exhibit in a Boston hotel from the Smithsonian, because it looks like a great picture.  The caption reads:  Boston, Mass.: Rare lobster exhibited at hotel exposition. Ann Donnelly, an attendant at the exposition in the Mechanics Building, holds a blue lobster, one of the very few which has been taken out of New England waters in many years. 5/20/26.

Out of the water, there are lots of blue lobsters, on pottery and paper, fabric and canvas (besides lots of restaurants and Nike sneakers). I particularly liked this platter from Apartment 48, a repurposed nineteenth-century image from Etsy seller Ephemera Press, and an original watercolor called A Lobster Tale by Sarah Storm.

7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Nature

June 18, 2012

Salem and the War of 1812

By daseger

On this day 200 years ago President James Madison declared war on Great Britain, commencing the War of 1812, a conflict that must have meant very different things to different people.  I imagine that Canadians viewed the War as an attempted land grab by upstart Americans and I know that the British viewed it as an annoyance by pesky Americans occurring when the far greater threat, Napoleon, deserved all of their attention.  As an English historian, I never really gave the War of 1812 much consideration, but living here in Salem one can’t help but see its lasting impact.  The people of Salem in particular, and coastal New England in general, were bitterly opposed to the War, nearly to the point of secession.  They believed that it would spell the end of their commercial ascendancy, and they were right.

Salem and other ports up and down the Eastern seaboard had already suffered from the policies of the preceding Jefferson administration, most notably the Embargo Act of 1807, and Madison’s war was seen as a continuation of these anti-commercial (and anti-American?) policies.  One of the most often-cited causes of the War, the impressment of thousands of American seamen by the British Navy, apparently did not rally Salem to the cause, if this 1813 Salem Gazette article is any indication.

I’ve cropped a much larger document from the Library of Congress; it’s difficult to read from the scan, but this article consists of two comparative columns regarding the fates of “Impressed Seamen from Salem” (their parentheses, not mine):  the official story and then “the facts”, which seem to conclude that the seamen in question were simply deserters or otherwise unaccounted for.  This article is implicitly (explicitly?) accusing the US government of perpetuating a hoax on its citizenry in order to rationalize war with Britain, an accusation that doesn’t seem very extreme if you examine the words and deeds of Salem’s opposition Federalist party over the previous decade.  Salem’s leading Federalist was the eminent Timothy Pickering (1745-1829), former Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Senator and current Congressman, pictured below in a contemporary caricature of the Hartford Convention, comprising the New England opposition to the War. Kneeling before King George III in the center, Pickering is given the words:  I, strongly and most fervently pray for the success of this great leap which will change my vulgar name into that of my Lord of Essex. God Save the King.  No wonder that he and his associates were accused of being “Blue-Light Federalists”,  traitors who signalled to British ships with blue lights from the New England shores.  The Federalist Party would never recover from that accusation, in Salem or elsewhere.

Besides political opposition, the other major role played by Salemites during the War of 1812 was that of more proactive privateering.  Captain George Coggeshall’s History of the American Privateers and Letters-of-Marque during our War with England in the Years 1812, ’13, and ’14 (1844) is full of the exploits of Salem privateering vessels, including the Polly, the Snowbird, the Buckskin, the Montgomery, the John, the Revenge, the Dolphin, and the justly-famous Fame.  I particularly liked this passage about the Dolphin which Coggeshall culled from the Salem Gazette:  the privateer Dolphin, after a successful cruise of 20 days, returned to Salem on the 23rd of July.  The Dolphin has taken six prizes without receiving the smallest injury.  She was reportedly chased by the English at one time for 24 hours, but finally escaped. She has treated her prisoners with the greatest kindness. In rowing away from men-of-war, she found great aid from their voluntary assistance.  The prisoners said they had much rather go to America than return aboard a British man-of-war.”  The Fame had similar success before her shipwreck in 1814, and a reproduction Fame has been embarking on cruises around Salem Harbor for nearly a decade.  Her Captain, Michael Rutstein, has recently published an illustrated history of Salem privateers entitled The Privateering Stroke:  Salem’s Privateers in the War of 1812.

George Ropes, The Launching of the Ship Fame, 1802. Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.

Ultimately what become known as the War of 1812 ended in a draw in 1814, with lessons learned on both sides.  For the Americans, I think the most important lesson was:  it’s not enough to just grow or sell things, we’ve got to MAKE things (like Great Britain).  So Salem’s commercial heyday was over, but its industrial era was just about to begin.

John Archibald Woodside, We Owe Allegiance to No Crown, 1814:  part of the current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery:  1812:  A Nation Emerges.


9 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History, Salem

June 11, 2012

Unnatural History

By daseger

I have no idea what I was searching for, but somehow I came upon some images from Henry Louis Stephens’ Comic Natural History of the Human Race this past weekend and was immediately captivated: anything anthropomorphic always has that effect on me. This book represents both actual people (mostly from the Philadelphia area where Stephens lived and worked) and stereotypes in the guises of those birds, insects, animals and fish that match up with their natures. I imagine that Stephens got away with his particularly unflattering caricatures by using general types (a sanctimonious religious moralist, for example, is depicted as a blood-sucking vampire; there are several rats) rather than specific people. Published in 1851 by Samuel Robinson of Philadelphia, the book is also an early example of color lithography, with plates by Louis Rosenthal and Peter Kraemer.

Here are some of the images, beginning with the only name in the book that I recognized:  P.T. Barnum, portrayed by Stephens as a “Hum-Bug”. The “Stool Pigeon”, the “Woodpecker” (William P. Gihon, an engraver), the “Bird of Paradise”, and the “Taylor Bird” (Mary Cecilia Taylor, an opera singer) follow. On the title page, Stephens presents himself as the hen that hatched this egg, thus mitigating any hurt feelings that might have ensued.

Henry Louis Stephens, The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (Philadelphia: Samuel Robinson, 1851), accessed via Internet Archive.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture, History

June 10, 2012

Our Ship Comes In

By daseger

Yesterday the Friendship of Salem, a reproduction 1797 three-masted East Indiaman, returned after an absence of many months. It was a beautiful, breezy day, so I went down to Derby Wharf to wait for it, and promptly fell asleep (right in the midst a crowd of people, pretty embarrassing).  When I woke up, the ship was almost upon the wharf (a startling sight to wake up to, actually), so I missed its approach. It rounded the wharf and glided to its berth, negotiating a graceful turnaround along the way so it could back in–its accompanying little pilot boats doing much of the work.  And then The Friendship was home.

For a geographical overview and some historical context, here are two bird’s-eye views of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site by National Park Service illustrator Fred Freeman:  where once there were many busy wharves, now there is only the long Derby and the much shorter Hatch’s and Central wharves. Imagine not one Friendship, but many.

More harbor views, both romantic and realistic:  the scene from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Custom House office, from an interesting article entitled “The Salem of Hawthorne” by Julian Hawthorne in The Century Magazine (1884) , an illustration from an article on post-fire Salem in The New England Magazine (1914), and an undated advertisement for coal, which I found among other papers in the third-floor eaves of my house last week. Mr. Phillips lived in the house in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when Salem’s wharves were housing less glorious goods than those brought in by The Friendship many years before.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History, Salem