Tag Archives: Culture

October 19, 2012

Places, Past, Present

By daseger

I’ve been thinking about a short little article by BBC “History of the World” presenter Andrew Marr about the five most historical places in world history quite a bit since I came across it a few days ago. I love lists, I love history, understanding and developing a strong sense of place has always been important to me (it’s one of the major themes of this blog), and I teach world history:  Marr has my rapt attention!

His choices are based on a world history perspective, but I think one of his historical places betrays his British bias, or maybe not:  I’ll discuss below. Here are his picks:

1. The Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa: where human civilization first emerged. A pretty predictable choice, and certainly one that is difficult to contest!

2. The Yellow River:  China’s “mother river”, where its first civilization emerged.  I’m not sure why Marr is privileging China above other world civilizations:  he does not have Mesopotamia, the western “cradle of civilization” on his list.

3. Athens, Greece:  symbol of the Classical Age. I suppose this is Marr’s concession to ancient western civilization, and I think he feels sorry for present-day Greece.  But it’s another obvious choice:  rational philosophy, democracy, theater, architecture, the Olympics–I could go on.

Ok, now we take a huge chronological jump:  from the 5th century BC to the eighteenth century. There is no amazingly significant place which has medieval (or as the world historians say, post-classical) relevance?  This seems like a very Renaissance view.

4. Berkeley, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom:  the birthplace of Dr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823), who discovered the vaccination for smallpox.  This is the only British place on the list (not London!) and Marr is a presenter for the BBC, so I thought it was a rather biased choice, but now I’m not so sure.  Smallpox was a terrible disease, which killed millions of people in the New World and remained an endemic plague in the Old, and Jenner’s vaccination was an amazing empirical breakthrough.  I think smallpox is the only disease in world history which has been completely eradicated, and that makes Jenner a towering figure both in the history of medicine and the history of civilization. Nevertheless, I think one of the five most important places in world history has to be more than the birthplace of just one person, however great he or she was.

5. Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States of America:  birthplace of the atomic bomb and the Atomic Age.  A great choice:  it’s sad that this is the American contribution to the list, but there you are. If you only have five places to choose of relevance in world history, you’ve got to go with the most consequential.

This is a great list but I think there are a few places I would change.  It’s so difficult to choose, because the list is short and the history is long–and complex.  Obviously there are countless historical places; in fact, every place is historical.  Choosing just five places is an exercise in frustration, but also one in prioritization, which is always useful. On my list, the Yellow River would be replaced by a city along the Silk Road that connected China and the Middle East and disseminated so many Chinese innovations, for better or for worse:  textiles, gunpowder, printing, the compass.  Maybe Samarkand or Bukhara, both currently in Uzbekistan, but symbolizing the West’s desire to obtain the knowledge and goods of the East.

Samarkand, Uzbekistan:  Silk Road “Port”.

I considered Istanbul, Venice, and Rome, ports along the western African “slave coast”, and New York, but dismissed them all on relative criteria–basically my western bias.  But I cannot dismiss Jerusalem, one of the oldest cities in the world and a holy place for three world religions.  In my mind, there is no doubt that Jerusalem is one of the most important places in world history, so at least one of Marr’s places has got to go. What do you think?

Jerusalem

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in History

September 14, 2012

Another Cartophilic Collection

By daseger

I’ve posted on trade cards several times, and they remain a form of ephemera that I casually collect. It seems to me that these early business cards are among the least ephemeral of ephemera–so many survive.  And most of them are the standardized children/animals/flowers variety.  So I’m pretty picky:  my collection is full of Salem items, cards with unusual shapes, cards that advertise Sarsaparilla (for some reason, a new interest of mine; when sold as a medicinal tonic at the end of the nineteenth century it contained something like 18% alcohol) and apothecaries in general, and those put out by the home furnishings trades. Occasionally odd images catch my fancy, and I don’t care what they are selling. I really prefer the earliest trade cards, issued in western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but I could never afford them and most of them are in rare book libraries anyway. It’s been a while since I featured any trade cards, so I thought that I’d showcase my most recent finds.

First, some Salem cards. Frank Cousins was an amazing photographer/entrepreneur who did much to capture and sell Salem a century ago:  the cards for his Essex Street shop, the Bee-Hive, were often issued in interesting shapes.  I always go for any view of the wharves and great examples of typography, and I love the font on Mr. Goodwillie’s card. The last card, presenting a western image of Chinese workers, is extremely interesting:  “others”, particularly Chinese, often appear on late nineteenth-century trade cards, and almost always in a stereotypical, racist and/or jingoistic way.  I’m not sure what’s going on with this card, issued by a Salem pharmacist; most likely it is part of a series.

As you can see, A.A. Smith is offering “petroleum remedies”:  even more unusual is the”magnetized food” on sale at a Brooklyn pharmacy.  I’ve included the back of the card so you can see the pitch:  using children to appeal to their mothers, obviously an age-old practice.  And then there are two cards issued by the Charles I. Hood Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, the leading manufacturer of the equally healthy Sarsaparilla.

“Magnetized Food” trade card from the Library Company of Philadelphia Digital Exhibit: Nineteenth-Century Pharmacists’ Trade Cards from the William H. Helfand Collection.

I thought I was familiar with all the digital databases of works on paper but just recently I found the online collection of the Rothschild family’s Waddesdon Manor, which includes over 700 trade cards from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is an amazing resource for all sorts of things. The Rothschilds were probably the greatest collectors of the nineteenth century, and I was surprised to see so many humble trade cards among their more luxurious acquisitions, but apparently Ferdinand von Rothschild, the builder of Waddesdon, was interested in every aspect of French life and culture in the eighteenth century. Here are three late-seventeenth-century cards from his collection, with which urban outfitters offered their services and wares:  the first one is from a hat-maker, the second from a vestment-maker, and the last one from a furrier. Mere slips of paper that survived all these many years.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in History

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

June 4, 2012

An Adaptable Artist

By daseger

I am indeed surrounded by the former homes of Salem painters from a century ago, with Frank Benson’s and Philip Little’s houses across the street and the home of a particularly prolific painter, Isaac Henry Caliga (1857-1944) nearly next door. I continue to wonder what Salem’s pre-war (World War I), pre-fire creative community was like. Of all the Salem artists that I’ve written about here, Caliga is the most difficult to categorize and pin down:  his works encompass everything from Sargent-like portraits to pastel drawings to illustrations for turn-of-the-century romance novels.  Unlike Benson and Little, he did not come from a wealthy New England family, but rather from a Midwestern family of German immigrants (apparently his unusual last name was a latinized version of the family name “Steifel”).  He did not summer in the Maine or New Hampshire, but rather on Cape Cod, in the company of the earliest members of an emerging artists’ colony in Provincetown.  To my knowledge, he never painted a maritime scene, unless you count the outer Cape dunes.

Caliga was born in Indiana and trained in New York and Munich.  By the later 1880s he was in Boston, and after the turn of the century he was residing in Salem, in a stately Italianate house at the eastern end of Chestnut Street. What drew him here I do not know, but I found several juried art exhibitions in which he was presenting and Benson was judging, perhaps the latter was the link. There are scattered references to his activities over the next few decades–references to restoration work and a centennial celebration Hawthorne portrait in the Collections of the Essex Institute, brief summaries of his career in The New England Magazine and Who’s Who in America, pictures of his pewter collection in American Homes and Gardens, trial records for the successful defense of his copyrighted Guardian Angel illustration (which seems to have been extremely popular–hence the copyright infringement–but which I cannot find), mentions of his participation in Charles Hawthorne’s Cape Cod School of Art, and a notice of his 1924 marriage to Provincetown printmaker Elizabeth Howland. He was clearly no dilettante, but a working artist who sought “serious” commissions while simultaneously engaging in illustration work—lots of illustration work.

First, the serious paintings:  society portraits and a few genre paintings.

Portrait of John J. Enneking, 1884 (Vose Galleries, Boston); Portrait of  Thomas Allen, 1885 (Walker–Cunningham Fine Art); Portrait of Mrs. William Kesson Vanderbilt (Simpson Galleries); The Pink Kimono, 1910–1915 (Brock & Co.); The Politicians, n.d. (Sotheby’s).

Then there are the illustrations, rendered for books that were hardly classics but probably pretty popular:  early examples of “women’s fiction” catering to an audience that was quite different from his society patrons.  He seems to have been working full-time for Little, Brown in Boston during the first decade of the twentieth century, turning out illustrations for such provocative titles as The Awakening of the Duchess by Fannie Charles (1903), A Detached Pirate:  the Romance of Gay Vandeleur by Helen Milecete (1903), The Effendi:  a Romance of the Soudan by Florence Brooks Whitehouse (1904), A Woman’s Will by Anne Warner (1904), and The Castle of Doubt by John Whitson (1907). A middle-aged divorcée is romanced!  Romance in the desert!  Romance on the high seas! Caliga’s name is always featured very prominently on the title pages and in accompanying advertising:  I do wonder if his artistic reputation suffered a bit because of this rampant commercialism?

Evidently not.  Caliga’s obituary in The New York Times (18 October 1944) focuses exclusively on his portraits:  Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Isaac Henry Caliga, widely-known as a portrait painter and the oldest member of the art colony here, died yesterday on Cape Cod after a week’s illness.  His age was 88.  Born in Auburn, Indiana, he studied in Europe and formerly lived in Salem. Among his portraits are those of the late President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Governor Alexander Rice, which now hangs in the State House, Boston, and James B. Colgate, financier, which is in the New York Chamber of Commerce.  Two images of Caliga’s Massachusetts life, his Salem house and the Cape Cod dunes, are below.

Truro Dunes, 1890.  Boston Art Club.

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

May 21, 2012

Long Hill

By daseger

Just to the north of Salem, over the Danvers River, is the city of Beverly, of similar size demographically but much larger geographically.  Beverly has a vibrant downtown, which is surrounded by lots of neighborhoods which are quite distinct: Ryal Side on the river, the historic Cove, the affluent coastal communities of Beverly Farms and Pride’s Crossing, inland Montserrat and Centerville, and North Beverly.  This is not an exhaustive list; neighborhood identities are well-established in Beverly. There are amazing Gilded Age mansions in the Farms and Pride’s Crossing, and the entire North Shore coast achieved an even more gilded reputation after President William Howard Taft made Beverly the site of his “Summer White House” in 1909, first renting the Stetson Cottage at Woodbury Point in the Cove and then “Parramatta”, a house in Montserrat.

President Taft’s first Summer White House in Beverly; after 2 summers here, his landlady, Mrs. Maria Evans, informed the President that she was replacing the house with an Italian garden (still there, in the now-public Lynch Park)!  The house was cut into halves, put on barges, and floated across the water to Peaches Point in Marblehead.  You can see all the pictures at the digital exhibition of the Beverly Historical Society.  Paramatta, the second Taft Summer White House, is below.

By way of introducing I am digressing!  Suffice it to say that Beverly had a well-established reputation as the site of a wealthy and politically-connected summer society before and after the coming of President Taft, and the architecture to prove it.  I’m going to take on a few of the greater North Shore’s more famous (and interesting) summer “cottages” myself this summer,but in the meantime you can satisfy any curiosity you may have with the wonderful book by Pamela W. Fox, North Shore Boston: Country Houses of Essex County, 1865-1930, or Joseph Garland’s Boston‘s Gold Coast: The North Shore, 1890–1929.

One theme that emerges from both books is the difference between the simple wooden structures built by the Boston Brahmins before Taft’s time and the more elaborate mansions built by non-Bostonians after.  That trend does not quite apply to the house that I am writing about today, Long Hill, built by Atlantic Monthly editor-owner Ellery Sedgwick and his wife Mabel in then-rural Centerville, away from the maddening crowd on the coast.  Sedgwick’s Massachusetts (western Massachusetts) roots go way back, but he did not choose to build a restrained Yankee cottage; instead he and Mrs. Sedgwick copied (and mined) a dilapidated Southern house:  the Isaac Ball House (1802) in Charleston, South Carolina. I tried and tried to find a photograph of the original Charleston house in situ, to no avail (only turning up images of the Ball family’s several plantations, all in sad states, and a few references to the “town house”) but Long Hill, completed around 1921, is supposed to be a close copy.

When I visited Long Hill the other day, I ran into some architect friends of mine, who pointed out details that I would have not seen on my own:  the perfect proportions (sadly missing in modern “Georgian” Mcmansions), the old, weathered, mellowed brick, certainly not circa 1920 brick, the very delicate columns, the classical details.  It is a charming house, well-situated, but it still looks a bit out-of-place to me.  I’m more impressed with the gardens, and all the surrounding woodland.  I never really understood why the Sedgwicks wanted to be so far away from coastal “society” (and breezes), because I never really knew about Mrs. Sedgwick’s horticultural interests—and achievements.  The author of The Garden Month by Month (1907, lots of illustrations and a pull-out flower color chart) wanted land, not ocean views, and she and her husband acquired 114 acres in Centerville on which to build not only their house but their very cultivated garden, even more impressive because of the contrast between it and the woodlands beyond.  Mabel Cabot Sedgwick died in 1937, but her husband remarried another horticulturalist, Marjorie Russell Sedgwick, who continued to improve the gardens at Long Hill.  The property was transferred to the Trustees of Reservations in 1979, and remains a peaceful, pastoral retreat.

The gardens at Long Hill:  woodlands surround the manicured lawns and garden “rooms” adjacent to the house:  blooming Solomon’s Seal, wisteria & peonies.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in History, Houses

May 15, 2012

Mrs. Parker and the Colonial Revival in Salem

By daseger

A recent article about a beautiful garden in Litchfield, Connecticut in Traditional Home referred to that northwestern Connecticut town as the “birthplace” of the Colonial Revival movement in America, which struck me as a pretty bold claim.  It is a pretty little town that seemed to deliberately tie itself to a fixed point in time about a century ago, but certainly lots of places could claim to be the birthplace of such a widespread cultural movement.  We certainly had our share of Colonial Revivalists here in Salem in the guise of architects, photographers, artists and authors, many of whom I’ve already written about here, but one who I have not yet mentioned:  Mary Saltonstall Parker (1856-1920), author and artist, but above all, someone who captured the myriad details of the past and the present.

For the last part of her life, Mrs. Parker lived across the street from our house on Chestnut Street in the beautiful brick Federal house you see below, the only house on the street whose facade does not face the sidewalk. Her Salem and Chestnut Street roots go way back:  she was, in the words of her near-contemporary Mary Harrod Northend, “a descendant of Colonial dames”.  She grew up at the other end (and other side) of the street, in a house built by her great-grandfather, Captain Thomas Saunders, for her grandmother and grandfather, Mary Elizabeth Saunders and Leverett Saltonstall, later the first Mayor of Salem and a member of Congress. This same house, 41 Chestnut, later became the home of her parents, Lucy (Saltonstall) Tuckerman and Dr. John Francis Tuckerman , and consequently her childhood home.  She left upon her marriage to William Phineas Parker, a cousin of the Parker Brothers of game-fame, but she didn’t go far.

So Mary Saltonstall Parker grew up surrounded by the comfort of friends and family on a street lined with mansions which were filled with all the beautiful things that mercantile money could buy.  She seems to have taken none of this for granted, and starting in the 1890s she started documenting her world–first the past, then the past and the present.  Her first means of artistic documentation and expression was verse; her second, embroidery, a traditional colonial craft.  There is a flurry of little books in that last decade of the nineteenth century:  At the Squire’s in Old Salem, Salem Scrap Book, Rules for Salad, in Rhyme, A Baker’s Dozen of Charades, A Metrical Melody for the Months, and, my favorite, Small Things Antique.  This last book is a charming discourse (in verse, of course) on all the little things she finds around the house, most of which no longer have any purpose but decoration: badges (the precursors of buttons, I suppose) from the 1840 and 1850 elections, warming pans (In old New England homes their use is ended, They hang with ribbon from the wall suspended. They stood for so much comfort in the days, When all our heating came from a log fire’s blaze), toasting forks, patch boxes, knee buckles, the pink lustre china on her shelves, the old jewelry in her top drawer.

The last item she observes in Small Things Antique is a sampler, and that schoolgirl craft would be her major form of expression for the last part of her life.  With her needlecraft, however, I think you can see the difference between Colonial and Colonial Revival:  Mary Saltonstall Tuckerman Parker’s samplers might have been produced with traditional techniques, but their themes were contemporary:  war and uncertainty in the first decades of the twentieth century.  The two samplers below, from the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, show a mother’s anxiety before and during World War One.  There are biblical passages combined with very contemporary references and images above, and below, an amazing mixture of past and present:  her own family warriors (her father, John Francis Tuckerman, a naval surgeon, and her two sons, Francis and William, presently in the service) along with an image from the Bayeaux Tapestry!  A long–very long–tradition of wartime embroidery.  The sampler has even more currency because of her “notation” that it was completed just after the November Armistice, the “Dawn of Peace”.

Mary Saltonstall Parker Samplers, from the Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum.  These images were scanned from Painted with Thread:  the Art of American Embroidery by Paula Bradstreet Richter, the Curator of Textiles and Costumes at the PEM.  Painted with Thread is the companion catalog to the 2001 exhibition of the same name.

Mrs. Parker’s samplers gained national recognition during World War One, and one was commissioned for the cover of House Beautiful in 1916:  a more traditional example, in both technique and imagery.

The last sampler completed by Mrs. Parker before her death in 1920 has an outwardly traditional appearance as well, with its house and garden and quotes (the Prior one at the top is particularly poignant) but it also reveals personal sentiments, for better or worse:  the words Armistice and Victory put us in the time, and the nearly snuffed-out candles bracketing her name tell us that her time is nearing an end.

Mary Saltonstall Parker (1856-1920), Sampler, 1920, from Paula Bradstreet Richter, Painted with Thread, The Art of American Embroidery (Peabody Essex Museum, 2001).

 

15 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem, Women's History

April 29, 2012

Encircling Salem Artists

By daseger

There’s been a lot of discoveries since I started this blog over a year ago, but one of the biggest has been a growing appreciation of the artistic environment which existed in Salem a century or so ago, well past what historians consider the city’s golden age.  Culturally speaking, Salem was vibrant not only in the 1790s, but also in the 1890s, when Frank Benson, Phillip Little, Ross Sterling Turner, Dwight Blaney, and John Leslie Breck were within its midst.  I’ve already written about Little and Benson, whose houses I can gaze upon from my bedroom window, but the other gentlemen are more recent discoveries.  Blaney, from an old Salem family (Blaney Street runs down to the Salem Ferry dock), was not only an artist but one of the first serious collectors of American antiques.  In many ways, he is a collecting link between several of these men:  Turner married his elder sister and lived in Salem, and both Blaney and Breck visited them often from their primary homes in the western suburbs of Boston.  Benson and Little were more grounded in Salem (though they summered in northern New England like all artists of means), Blaney seems to have been happily ensconced at both his main home in Weston and his summer house on Ironbound Island, off Mt. Desert in Maine (where he received many distinguished guests, including Breck and John Singer Sargent, and which you can read about here), but Turner and Breck seem like men of the world to me:  student days in Europe, considerable time at Giverny with Monet (Breck), long forays in Bermuda and Mexico (Turner).  They were both advocates of “modern” art, and seem to have been inspired by the cultural environment of greater Boston and the North Shore while at the same time occasionally at odds with it.

I found an interesting notice in the Boston Transcript from the spring of 1890, shortly after Breck had returned from Giverny to hold a one-man show at the St. Botolph Club through which Impressionism was introduced to Boston.  He had also formed a teaching studio with Turner in Salem (at the latter’s house on Bridge Street, a pretty busy thoroughfare now and then) and these developments apparently did not please the anonymous author of the “Fine Arts” column.

     Ross Turner and John Leslie Breck have returned to this country from foreign parts, and threaten to form a class for out-of-door work in painting at Salem during the month of June.  Mr. Turner will give instructions in watercolor work, and Mr. Breck in both oils and watercolors, as well as in drawing from models.  Mr. Breck is somewhat famous in a limited way as the only pupil of the impressionist Claude Monet, and we may as well be prepared for anything and everything when he lets loose a flock of sweet girl graduates, duly inoculated with the impressionistic visual virus, whose landscapes may blend the charms of amateurishness with those of other kinds of incoherence, “till all is blue”.

THE IMPRESSIONISTIC VISUAL VIRUS!  What a great line; it sounds very modern. What a reminder of how new (and apparently threatening)Impressionism was in the late nineteenth century–and also how conservative Boston was.  The reference to “sweet girl graduates” might be an allusion to Breck’s  romantic reputation, gained at Giverny.  No matter, both Turner and Breck seemed to prosper in the 1890s, both in and around Salem and beyond.  Here are some of my favorite works of both artists, representing careers that were both cut short:  Turner died in the Bahamas in 1915, “following a long illness”, while Breck died of asphyxiation in 1899–an apparent suicide–at age 39.

Ross Sterling Turner (1847-1915):  Street Scene in Munich, 1880 (Smithsonian Museum of American Art); The Old Manse (printed etching from Riverside Press’s Hawthorne Portfolio, 1884); Fairylands, Bermuda, 1890 (part of the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Exhibit “The Wonderful World of Watercolours”, closing today); Doorway of Henry Lee Higginson Estate (outside Boston), 1894; and his most popular work, A Garden is a Sea of Flowers, 1912 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899):  Willows (1888); Grey Day on the Charles (1894) and The Dragon in Winter, Essex (Massachusetts), 1896.  All accessed through the Smithsonian Institution Inventory of American Art and all in private collections.


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

April 27, 2012

Anniversary History

By daseger

Sometimes I think that all history in the public sphere is anniversaic, as if nothing in the past matters unless there’s a big anniversary involved, generally a centennial.  In the past few weeks, I’ve heard countless stories in the media about the sinking of the Titanic and the opening of Fenway Park, two very diverse events that happened in 1912 and thus share an anniversary in 2012.  On a more personal note, this is a big year for our family as my grandmother turns 100:  1912 was a very big year indeed.

As a professional historian, history-as-anniversary kind of bothers me: it is exclusively event-oriented, ignores more complex social, economic and cultural developments, and is so obviously subjective.  On the other hand, it does raise awareness about the past, which is always a good thing in my opinion, and it can be fun.  I thought I would sprint backwards through the last millennium and pick my own big events for the years 1812, 1712, 1612 and so on, thus demonstrating how very arbitrary such an exercise can be:  as someone trained in late medieval and early modern European history living in New England, my chosen events are going to be very different from those of, say, a modern African historian living on the West Coast.  So what is history?

I’m starting out here in Salem, a century ago, where crowds are in Town House Square, soon (April 29) to be the site of a campaign stop by former President Theodore Roosevelt, now a candidate for the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) party.  Roosevelt took the train up from Boston, gave a quick speech, and departed for the next town.

Moving backwards to 1812, my Salem perspective mandates that I pick the War of 1812 as my big event of the year (even though it certainly wasn’t over in 1812).  This war had a huge impact on Salem (and other eastern seaports), in effect ending its golden age.  This summer, there will be courses and exhibits at Salem State University and the Salem Athenaeum:  anniversary history.  I wonder if I was standing on Salem’s highest point, Legge’s Hill (now the site of a hulking YMCA, but offering the best view of Salem Harbor) could I have seen the engagement between the American Chesapeake and the British Shannon or the USS Constitution being chased by two British frigates?

The Constitution in 1803 by Salem artist Michele Felice Corne; the Capitol after burning by British Troops, 1814 (Drawing by George Munger, Library of Congress).

For the year 1712 I’m leaving Salem, no longer the center of the action, and crossing over to Britain. My big event for this year is the invention of the Newcomen Engine, the first machine to harness steam power for practical purposes–in this case, pumping out mines.  Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine might be less well-known than James Watt’s, which came later in the eighteenth century, but it was the first step of the Industrial Revolution.

The Newcomen Steam Engine, circa 1725.

I’m going to stay in Britain for the year 1612 and pick the Lancashire (Pendle) Witch Trials for my event of the year.  This was England’s largest witch hunt, small by continental comparison (12 accusations, 10 convictions on charges of murder by witchcraft, 10 executions) but one of the first trials in England which was focused on collective devil worship as opposed to individual maleficia.  It’s also an exceeding well-documented series of trials, and northern England seems to be gearing up for a Salem-esque 400th anniversary “commemoration”.

A 1612 chapbook about the Pendle Witches, and the 400th anniversary logo.

I’m heading to Italy for the year 1512: it’s the height of the Italian Renaissance and Michelangelo Buonarroti has completed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which is summarily unveiled to the public by Pope Julius II.  I don’t think I need to say anything else.

God Dividing the Waters detail, Sistine Chapel.

You notice that I haven’t left Europe?  I’m going to remain there for 1412 and choose a birth for that year:  the birth, sometime in January, of the “Maid of Orléans”, Joan of Arc, the French national heroine who inspired the French victory in the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and was martyred and canonized as a consequence.

Jeanne d’Arc in the company of saints, miniature circa 1485.

I am going to leave Europe and the west for my next big event:  1312 marks the beginning of the reign of arguably the greatest medieval African ruler, Mansa Musa (I) of the Mali Empire in west Africa.  Known for his great wealth, his cultural patronage (including the building of Timbuktu) and his pilgrimage to Mecca, Mansa Musa appears in European maps and texts long after his death.

Mansa Musa in the center of the Catalan Atlas, c. 1375.

North to Europe (sort of):  1212 was a big year in the history of the Spanish Reconquista, the centuries-long struggle on the part of Iberian Christians to recapture their peninsula from Muslim rulers.  At the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa that year, King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his Christian allies (including many crusader knights) won a decisive victory, leading to the decline and fall of the Almohad Empire in Spain.

1112 might have been the year that Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most remarkable and accomplished women of the Middle Ages (mystic, author, artist, abbess, composer) was “enclosed” in the Church by her parents, commencing her spiritual and artistic journey.  In any case, it looks like 2012 will be the year that Hildegard finally receives her canonization, after a long campaign.

One last martyr.  2012 marks the millennial anniversary of the martyrdom of Aelfheagh (Alphege), the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was beaten to death by a mob of drunken Danish Vikings who had taken him prisoner on April 19, 1012.  The Danes who were occupying England at the time wanted “protection money” more than land or power, but the Archbishop refused to be ransomed, and so they killed him in frustration.  He was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to die a violent death (and subsequently be martyred and canonized):  Thomas à Becket apparently prayed to St. Alphege before he met his own death in Canterbury Cathedral.

British children as Vikings outside St. Alfege Church,  Greenwich, near the scene of the crime.  One view of St. Alphege Millennium observances held around Great Britain last week.

And that concludes my millennium of time-traveling (really hit-and-run) history!

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March 21, 2012

Camellia Craze

By daseger

One associates the camellia more with the South than the North (at least I always have), but in the early and middle part of the nineteenth century there was such intense interest in the flower among the elites of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia that the term craze seems apt. Camellias are far from hardy up here, so the camellia craze coincided with a flurry of greenhouse building.  All around Boston greenhouses popped up in the 1820s and 1830s, each one producing a profusion of hothouse flowers for Yankee homes.  At an exhibition sponsored by the fledgling Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1836, Charles Mason Hovey, a local nurseryman and later a prominent horticultural publisher, showed 12 varieties of Camellia Japonica, one of which was named after him.

Herman Bourne, Flores Poetici, The Florist’s Manual (Boston, 1833); J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées (1847).

Another prominent Camellia enthusiast was Boston merchant Theodore Lyman, who commissioned Salem’s own Samuel McIntire to design a country house  for his property west of the city in 1793.  The Lyman Estate or “The Vale”, as it was called then and now, included not only the McIntire mansion (later considerably altered and expanded; you can see a great post on its later history and interiors here), surrounding grounds, and a beautiful carriage house, but also a chain of greenhouses.  The Vale remained the country seat of the Lyman family for over 150 years, and was conveyed to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) in 1951.  Both the house and the carriage house are undergoing significant repairs at present but the greenhouses are open all year long, and I visited them last week, near the end of the annual “Camellia Days”.

The Vale in halcyon days, before its Victorian and Colonial Revival alterations (courtesy Historic New England) and last week, in the midst of roofing work.

There are four greenhouses at the Lyman Estate, the oldest one dating from 1804.  The “Camellia House” was built in 1820, right in the middle of the camellia craze in Boston.  I visit the greenhouses several times a year just to see the very established specimens within or for plant sales.  Even apart from the plants, the infrastructure is also very appealing, as is the juxtaposition of soft russet brick, Victorian steam fittings, and glass.  I have made it for the height of camellia season in the past, which is generally in February, but I was late in this busy year:  some of the camellias you see below are still blooming, but the general ambiance was one of faded glory.

The Camellia House is the last of the chain of greenhouses, so you go through glass rooms of tropical plants, fruit trees, succulents (!!!!), orchids, and then you’re there….

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