Tag Archives: Culture

June 19, 2011

Trendy Tobacco

By daseger

The Peabody Essex Museum‘s exhibit Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection closes this weekend after a spectacular run. I think that Dutch “Golden Age” paintings are so popular because of the combination of technical precision and enhanced intimacy; both the familiar and the exotic are rendered with such artistry that one is drawn into the painting in a very absorbing way. I went to the Museum several times this past week to find crowds of people sneaking in their last peaks and individuals studying every little detail of the paintings so intently (with supplied magnifying glasses) that they appeared to be almost falling into the frames.

Everybody’s (including Mr. van Otterloo’s, apparently) favorite painting from the exhibition seems to be a small portrait of a white sleeping dog, with its hair and form so precisely and warmly rendered that you really did want to reach out (in) and touch him. Because I like things, my favorite paintings were the still-lifes, and one still-life in particular, Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life with Glasses and Tobacco, 1633.

Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life with Glasses and Tobacco, 1633. Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection. Image courtsey Peabody Essex Museum

Tobacco (and its accessories) was such a popular subject matter in the mid-seventeenth-century Low Countries that a subgenre of still lifes, toebakje, was entirely devoted to it. Indeed, tobacco can be seen in all sorts of Golden Age paintings, in the background, in the foreground, as a primary or ancillary activity.

Pieter Claesz, Tobacco Pipes and a Brazier, 1636. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Adriaen Brower, The Smokers, 1636. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tobacco was the most popular “American” plant in early modern Europe not only because of its addictive qualities but also because of its perceived medicinal virtues. The esteemed Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes, whose work was published in England under the title Joyfull Newes out of the New Found World in the 1570s, wrote enthusiastically about the virtues of tobacco,”an herb of great estimation”, that can “reduce wounds to perfect health” and cure “griefs” of the head, breast, joints, stomach, teeth, and women. Due to the influence of Monardes and other “medical” writers, as well as that of Sir Walter Raleigh who returned from America a fierce (addicted) advocate of tobacco, smoking became particularly popular in England. Instead of lovely oil paintings, illustrations from popular pamphlets illustrate the general English acceptance of what Ben Jonson called that tawny weed.

Illustrations from Anthony Chute’s Tabaco (1595), Richard Braithwaite’s The Smoking Age (1617), George Glover’s Fowre Complexions (1630), and The Sucklington Faction or (Sucklings) Roaring Boyes (1641)

Another indication of the popularity of tobacco in England was the protestation of King James I (r. 1603-25) against it. In his Counterblast to Tobacco, first published in 1604, the King condemned smoking as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain,dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” The King had his anti-tobacco admirers, but his prescient words didn’t really catch on for another 350 years.

3 Comments | tags: Art, Culture, printing, Seventeenth Century | posted in History

June 9, 2011

Pirate Colors

By daseger

For various reasons (time spent on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, teaching a lot of maritime history this summer, popular culture, news) I’ve been thinking a lot about pirates lately. Pirates were (and are) violent outlaws, so it is interesting to trace the increasing romanticization and trivialization of their image over the modern era. The transformation of the pirate from thug to dashing, colorful rogue began in the nineteenth century, when a succession of Robin Hoodesque pirate representations were embraced by an apparently eager audience. From Byron’s 1814 poem The Corsair, to the incredibly popular Pirates’ Own Book (1837) by George Elms and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (first produced in 1879), a decidedly less menacing pirate emerged than that of the prior “Golden Age” of piracy (roughly 1650-1730). This characterization continued in the twentieth century with books (including images) like Howard Pyle’s Pirates Book (1921) and Raphael Sabatini’s Captain Blood (1922). And so the archetypal pirate emerged, along with his archetypal accessories, including the ” Jolly Roger” flag, with its intimidating skull and crossbones against a black background.

In an article in the Design section of the New York Times last month (highlighting a new exhibition on Captain Kidd at the Museum of London Docklands), Alice Rawsthorn observes that the adoption of the skull and crossbones was “an astonishingly successful exercise in collective branding design”, but it took western pirates a while to get there, and it seems that there were quite a variety of pirate flags out there on the high seas even as the Jolly Roger took hold. Before 1700 pirates flew plain black or red (“bloody”) flags, and in the eighteenth century there was an array of emblems out there, many including an hourglass to broadcast the message that your time is limited if you mess with us. The beautiful 1929 book Scourge of the Indies. Buccaneers, Corsairs, and Filibusters by Maurice Besson includes two variant pirate flags among its many illustrations.

I believe that the first Jolly Roger flag appeared in the foundational history of piracy, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson (a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe or perhaps a man named Nathaniel Mist). This book was first published in London in 1724 and seems to have been almost continually in print for the next century, so the image of the skull and crossbones (below in the background of the illustration of the “gentleman pirate” Stede Bonnet) became very recognizable.

Now-standard pirate flags in a host of images from the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Library of Congress: a theater handbill from 1833 illustrating the actor Billy Campbell in his Blackbeard costume, the title page of an 1845 Boston pamphlet about the female pirate captain Fanny Campbell, a propaganda cartoon from World War One, in which German Admiral Alfred von Turpitz bears down on New York with his Jolly Roger, and a Depression-era playbill for a performance of the Pirates of Penzance.

Finally, some very colorful pirates, fictional and real but equally dramatic, from twentieth-century collectible cigarette cards in the collection of the New York Public Library. The flag card dates from the last era of this popular genre of ephemera, the 1960s.

2 Comments | tags: Culture, ephemera, Nineteenth Century | posted in History

May 30, 2011

Civil War Remembrance

By daseger

Collective memory and expressions of remembrance have been fashionable topics among historians of the last generation or so; it seems like European historians prefer to focus on the culture of remembrance that developed after World War I while American historians dwell on that of the Civil War. These were devastating conflicts in so many ways. And of course World War II has its own unique commemorative culture. I find that holidays in general, and summer holidays in particular, are a great time to develop, or solidify, a sense of place, an increasingly elusive feeling in this generic world.

Given the fact that we’re in an anniversary year–the 15oth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War–I decided to follow the path laid out by the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), America’s first veteran’s organization and the inspirational force behind Memorial Day ( which was first known as “Decoration Day” and exclusively devoted to Civil War veterans) and examine Civil War remembrance here in Salem.

Before I get to Salem, a brief detour back to my hometown of York, Maine, where the Civil War statue resembles a CONFEDERATE officer, or at least what we have come to perceive as a Confederate officer. He looks odd not because he is incorrectly garbed but because he is anachronistically garbed, in the Spanish-American War uniform that was contemporary to the time of his creation in 1906. This statue, like all historical monuments, is reflective of both the time of its installation and the time it commemorates, perhaps more so the former than the latter.

Back to Salem. There is a Civil War plaque adjacent to the Common but the cemeteries provide a less perfunctory form of commemoration, I think. Salem has many old cemeteries, but the two newest and largest ones, Greenlawn and Harmony Grove, have the most Civil War grave sites as well as designated shrines. Both are nineteenth-century “garden” cemeteries; Greenlawn is public and thus a little worse for wear while Harmony Grove is private though still very accessible. Actually, Greenlawn’s slight shabbiness adds to its poignancy, represented so well by the Gothic Dickson Chapel in its midst.

Down the path to the monumental Civil War statue, dedicated in the 1880s, surrounded by the graves of Salem men who lost their lives during the War between the States. Their markers are very subtle, so obscured by grass you don’t realize what they are until you’re right on top of them. All the attention is focused on the large monumental anonymous (but recognizable) Union soldier in the center of the mound, who represents all of them. This statue bears all the marks of the official Civil War commemorative organizations, both the G.A.R and the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Merritt, the namesake of the SUVCW Camp, was killed at the battle of New Bern in April of 1862.

The Battle of New Bern, Harper's Weekly, April 1862

Over to Harmony Grove, a beautiful, terraced cemetery laid out in a series of winding paths lined by the crypts and semi-enclosed plots of some of Salem’s most prominent families. Despite a circle of decommissioned cannons, Harmony Grove’s Civil War installation is not as impressive as Greenlawn’s, and many of the individual soldier’s graves are in a deteriorating condition. A bit further down the path, however, is the impressive grave of one of Salem’s most eminent Civil War heroes, Luis Fenollosa Emilio (1844-1918).

Emilio was part of the amazing Fenollosa-Emilio family of Salem, Spanish immigrants and ardent abolitionists. He was a cousin to Ernest Fenollosa, the future Japanese cultural minister who I wrote about in an earlier post. Even though he was only 16, Emilio had enlisted in the army at the beginning of the Civil War, and when Massachusetts Governor John Andrew created the first Northern black regiment in 1863, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment (memorialized in Glory), he sought and received an officer’s commission. In fact, Captain Emilio was the only officer of the 54th who survived the disastrous assault on Fort Wagner and successive conflicts to tell the tale of the Regiment, which he did in A Brave Black Regiment. The History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment, or Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry, 1863-65 (1891).

Wrapping up my cemetery tour, I took a walk through the much older and smaller graveyard near my home. There were no flags here; these veterans lie unacknowledged. Two particularly poignant markers caught my eye, one of a seldom-heralded Revolutionary War soldier named Joshua Cross, and the other of Samuel Cook Oliver, a Civil War veteran who was severely wounded at the Battle of Antietam [and] died after many years of suffering cheerfully and bravely borne.

8 Comments | tags: abolitionism, Culture, holidays, Home | posted in History, Salem

May 18, 2011

Painting Abigail and Apple Blossoms

By daseger

Two lesser-known (at least to me!) Salem artists were born this week: Benjamin Blyth (or Blythe, 1746-1811) and Fidelia Bridges (1835-1923). Blyth was a colonial portrait pastellist, whose subjects included Abigail and John Adams in the early years of their marriage,while Bridges was a watercolorist and illustrator whose late nineteenth-century nature scenes expressed both the realism and the romanticism of her era.

Even before Blyth placed an advertisement in The Essex Gazette begging “leave to inform the Public, that he has opened a Room for the Performance of Limning in Crayons at the House occupied by his Father in the great Street leading towards Marblehead, where specimens of his Performance may be seen” in October of 1769, he had received commissions from notable persons in the Salem and Boston areas, including the Adamses. Apparently Abigail Adams’ sister lived in Salem, and the young married couple sat for Blyth during a visit with her in 1766.

Abigail Adams and John Adams, Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

The very first portrait of a future president (and present historical rock star) painted right here in Salem! According to Neil Jeffares’ Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, Blyth produced over two dozen pastel portraits during his career, but attribution is difficult because he seldom signed his work. Two other prominent people who were painted by Blyth (perhaps not as prominent as the Adamses but certainly very important Salem people) were Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke (1728-1829), physician, scientist, and early adopter of the controversial smallpox vaccination method (he inoculated himself during the epidemic of 1777) and architect-woodcarver Samuel McIntire. Holyoke’s image was captured by several artists more famous than Blyth, including John Singleton Copley, but the image below remained in the family until its sale at auction in 2007 for $35,960.

Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke by Benjamin Blyth, circa 1777 (with a black and gilt frame by Samuel Blyth), Northeast Auctions image, 2007.

The sole image we have of Samuel McIntire is Blyth’s, painted at some point in the 1780s and in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum.

While the date most commonly given for McIntire’s portrait is 1786, that would have been four years after Blyth left Salem for Richmond, Virgina, where he married a rich widow and continued his pastel portraiture. The last years of his non-Salem life seem somewhat shrouded in mystery.

And now for something (someone) completely different. Fidelia Bridges was born in a very different Salem more than a generation after Blyth left, and she lived well into the twentieth century. Bridges was also a far better-trained artist than Blyth, despite her gender and the difficult circumstances of her early life. Her parents died in quick succession (her ship captain father in China, her mother at home in Salem three months later) leaving her orphaned by the age of 15. After a brief bout on their own, she and her siblings were taken in by the wealthy Browne family of Brooklyn,(not sure what the connection between the Bridges and the Brownes is: cousins, friends of friends?) where Fidelia seems to have functioned as an unpaid combination mother’s helper/governess but was also exposed to the artistic environment of New York. By 1860 she was in Philadelphia, studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with the pre-Raphaelite artist William Trost Richards. The wealthy and well-connected Richards, though only a year older than Fidelia, became her lifelong mentor.

Fidelia Bridges in 1864, Lay Collection, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Fidelia Bridges’ works reveal small sections of nature, very closely-focused, detailed, and finely-drawn: the essence of birds and/or plants, with nothing added. She first worked in several mediums but became increasingly focused on watercolors, which apparently had increased in artistic stature at this time, and she was the first (and only, for a long while) female member of the American Watercolor Society. Below are two watercolors from the 1870s: Bird’s Next in Cattails (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Apple Blossoms (Babcock Galleries).

Though Bridges was well-connected and well-exhibited, she never married and had to support herself, which she could not do solely with the proceeds from the sale of her individual paintings. Consequently she became an illustrator, an increasingly respectable (and remunerative) profession for artistic ladies in the later nineteenth century. From the 1870s on, Bridges worked continuously for the printer-publisher Louis Prang & Company of Boston, providing illustrations for chromolithographic books, calendars, and greeting cards. One of Prang’s most artistic (and expensive) offerings was a series of twelve color prints illustrated by Bridges in 1876: Twelve Months. Below is the month of May, from the collection of the Boston Public Library.

Though born in Salem, Fidelia Bridges is more associated with the western Connecticut town of Canaan, where her Prang earnings enabled her to purchase a small rural estate with a rather wild old-fashioned garden, providing her with subject material for the rest of her life.

Leave a comment | tags: Art, Culture, Samuel McIntire | posted in History, Salem

May 16, 2011

The Willows in the Aughts

By daseger

Inspired by my student’s paper and Maurice Prendergast’s painting below, and hoping for a bit warmer weather, here are some views of Salem’s seaside amusement park, the Willows, during its golden heyday at the turn of the last century. Formerly Salem Neck, the site of a smallpox hospital (for which its namesake white willow trees were planted around 1801, with hopes of creating a tranquil convalescent setting) and adjacent farmland, the Willows became a municipal park in 1858 and was further developed and expanded with arcades, “Restaurant Row”, and adjacent vacation cottages from the 1870s. Two maps below, from the early and late nineteenth century, show its early development and connection to the main part of Salem. The first map, from the Norman B. Levanthal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, shows an almost completely rural Salem Neck in the upper right hand corner while the second, from the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum via Salem State’s grant website Salem in History, illustrates a much more connected Willows.

The Salem Willows Amusement Park never rivalled the larger Coney Island-esque parks like Revere Beach to the south and Old Orchard Beach to the north, but it was an extremely popular local recreation destination for factory workers from nearby Lynn and the Merrimack Valley, who would take the train to Salem Station and then hop on one of the horse-drawn trolleys which travelled to the Willows every 15 minutes or so in the summer. Once there, they found restaurants and picnic grounds, beaches for sunbathing, arcades, a casino, and the Pavilion, “flying horses” (a carousel) and an open-air theater, outgoing steamships, and lots and lots of people: by several estimates as many as 10,000 a day on a summer weekend. Much of the recreation that occurred at the Willows seems to have taken the form of promenading, a nice old-fashioned word (and activity) that is very well captured by Maurice Prendergast’s 1904 painting Salem Willows, the alternative title of which is Promenade, Salem Harbor.

Like Prendergast’s painting, postcards from the era (which must have been issued in the thousands, so many survive) convey the spirit of lazy, breezy promenading (by well-dressed people!) under the Willows. Here is a sampling, all from just the 1906-1910 period.

This last picture, from 1910, is prescient of things to come: the automobile will certainly change the Willows in a myriad of ways over the coming century: bringing about the end of its strictly summer identity and the creation of year-round neighborhood of Salem. While few of its turn-of-the-century structures still stand today, the Willows Park maintains a seasonal and somewhat timeless air about it, but adjacent Juniper Point has changed quite a bit, evolving from “tent city” to cottage colony to year-round residential community.

Leave a comment | tags: Culture, ephemera, urban planning | posted in History, Salem

May 8, 2011

Greenaway Mothers

By daseger

The British children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway (1846-1901) created a distinct silhouette for her depictions of children, but “Greenaway Mothers” are immediately recognizable as well: nostalgically attired in the same Regency cottons as their children, perfectly coiffed curls swept up in a seemingly effortless updo (always adorned with the appropriate hat), participating in the scene rather than just looking on. And husbandless–there are no “Greenaway fathers” to be found.

Greenaway grew up in the East End of London at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but she was able to spend precious time outside the city staying with relatives in the countryside, the setting for the perfect worlds she created in illustrations for over 60 books and countless serial publications, including The Girl’s Own Annual, for which the 1887 lithograph above was made. Along with Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, Greenaway was one of the so-called “Nursery Triumvirate” who worked with color printer Edmund Evans to revolutionize the children’s picture book industry in the later nineteenth century. Greenaway’s works included multiple editions of Mother Goose and ABC books, as well as “new” story books, and within a decade of the beginning of her career she was the author as well as the illustrator. Among the most popular of her publications was the annual Almanack she published between 1883 and 1895.

The middle image above is the only one I could find of working Greenaway mothers, placed in a somewhat industrial setting, but they still wear the idealized costumes of at least a half-century earlier. More characteristic in its bucolic background and floral motifs is Marigold Garden. Pictures and Rhymes by Kate Greenaway, first published in 1885.

Kate Greenaway created not only lasting images, but also a lasting brand. Her clothing was manufactured and sold to upper-middle-class mothers who wanted just that certain “handcrafted” look for their children while Greenaway-inspired prints graced textiles, tiles, and wallpapers. An 1893 example of the latter from the Victoria & Albert Museum is below, along with a modern version of a “Greenaway dress” by British paper artist Jennifer Collier.

4 Comments | tags: Art, Culture, design, holidays | posted in History

May 2, 2011

Timeworn Typewriters

By daseger

Vintage typewriters are having a moment. I think they’ve been having a moment for some time but suddenly their images are all around me, everywhere I turn in both real and digital life. Perhaps it is the ongoing impact of Steampunk (AllSaints Spitalfields stores feature many vintage machines in their displays, generally sewing machines and typewriters), or maybe it’s a sentimental attachment that has grown stronger with their gradual disappearance from our lives. Just last week I heard that the last typewriter had rolled off the production line of the last factory (in India) that still produced them.

I was thinking about typewriters even before I happened upon a charming old movie on television last week: The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. This 1947 musical (with music by the Gershwin brothers) stars Betty Grable as a young suffragette taking on Boston Brahmin society at the turn of the century armed only with her typewriter. After receiving her certificate from a business college in New York, she comes up to work in traditional Boston as the first female typist or typewriter (the turn “typewriter” is used exclusively for the person who is operating the machine rather than the machine itself). Everyone is shocked! She then becomes part of the very active suffrage movement (allowing us to listen to suffragette songs) and of course falls in love with her Brahmin boss, thus changing Boston society forever.

The typewriter-as-liberation theme was also played out in the recent PBS series Downton Abbey, in which a young parlor maid in Edwardian England surreptitiously acquires typewriting skills in order to escape from domestic service. There was a commercial school here in Salem at around the same time, providing young women with the skills necessary to get them out of the factory. From The Virtual Typewriter Museum, I have also learned that the first portable typewriter was produced right here in Salem in 1881 by the Hall Type-Writer Company. Who knew?

Most of the nostalgia for typewriters is focused on dark and bulky models from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but colorful mid-century models have their fans as well: the Olivetti portable typewriter seems to be particularly in demand. But for me, if you’re going to go back, you might as well go way back. This print (click on the image to get the link to Etsy) should suffice.

4 Comments | tags: Culture, design, ephemera, Shopping | posted in History, Salem

April 27, 2011

Salem Chests

By daseger

I’m finishing up my Tudor-Stuart course this week at Salem State, and while doing the course prep for a class on the reign of William and Mary (1689-94/1702) I became bored with the rather mundane political narrative (at least compared with the Tudors!) and turned to the style of the era. Then I became a lot more interested, particularly in following the transmission of material culture traditions and motifs from the Continent to England and ultimately to Salem.

Like its maritime heritage and architecture, the furniture of colonial and Federal Salem serves as a powerful counterweight to its Witch City reputation. There seems to be two periods of Salem furniture production that are particularly prized by collectors and scholars: the late seventeenth-century William & Mary era as represented by the Symonds Shops in Salem (c. 1670-1700) and the Federal era, when Salem had some sixty cabinetmakers working to produce furniture for both the domestic and export markets.

The Symonds business was established by joiner John Symonds (c. 1595-1671) who emigrated to Massachusetts from Norfolk, England in the 1630s and carried on by his sons James and Samuel. A Salem street is named after the family. Their chests have done very well at auction in the past decade or so, with the Pope “valuables cabinet” selling for 2.42 million dollars in 2000 (and back to Salem it came, to the Peabody Essex Museum). This chest is pictured below in a photograph from Christies, along with another Symonds cabinet from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The initials of the married couples who owned these chests (Joseph and Bathsheba Pope of Salem Village and Ephraim and Mary Herrick of Beverly), interwoven with the year (1679) of their creation, is carved on the front in the midst of the characteristic Symonds sunburst.

Another Salem Symonds chest, the “Putnam Family Cupboard”, was photographed by Salem’s famed photographer-entrepreneur Frank Cousins and sketched by Edwin Foley in a fanciful “colonial” environment a century ago. Both images are below, along with one of a so-called “Witch Bureau”, from the Pageant of America series, with the accompanying caption “from the middle drawer of which one of the witches jumped out who was hung at Gallows Hill in Salem.”

The "Witch Bureau", NYPL Digital Gallery

I’m not quite sure about this piece–very square legs compared to the other examples of the era—(and what a provenance!) although somewhat similar to the most recent Symonds piece to be auctioned off, at Sotheby’s this past January, the 1690 “Trask Chest”.

As I finish up my course with Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, I can’t help but dwell on the dramatic change in furniture style (again, because the narrative history is pretty boring, and all about the War of Spanish Succession): from solid squares to graceful curves. Edwin Foley, the author-illustrator of The Book of Decorative Furniture (1909-11), made his way right into the Queen’s bedroom so he could capture her colorful bedhangings and “Queen Anne” highboy and one of Frank Cousin’s interior photographs of the Peirce-Nichols house from the 1890s captured a similar chest.

Frank Cousins and the other advocates of Salem and its colonial architecture, furniture, and decorative arts created a brand that was almost as strong as “Witch City” in the early and mid-twentieth century. As proof, I offer two advertisements for newer models of Salem chests.

5 Comments | tags: advertising, Antiques, Christies, Culture, England | posted in History, Salem

April 23, 2011

Easter Expressions

By daseger

I find that I cannot avoid an offering of vintage Easter postcards even though I’m tempted to skip this particular greeting card occasion. Easter is a fine, joyous (relatively non-commercial) holiday, and you know I love print culture in general and ephemera in particular, but you put it all together and you get too much spring saccharine sweetness: too many cherubic children, too many chicks, too many eggs, too many flowers, too many bunnies. The publishers of greeting cards in the “golden age” of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries obviously admired all of these things, but Easter gave them the occasion to showcase all of them together. It’s just too much. Easter cards, which were very popular at this time, are a bit like Christmas cards, in that they represent a religious holiday but cannot be too overtly religious and still appeal to a mass and diverse public. Consequently the religious imagery increasingly fades to the background and cute, secular symbols are placed in the foreground, front and center: Santa Claus and his reindeer, the Easter Bunny and lots of eggs, particularly BIG eggs. Unlike cards for the other popular holidays of the time (and now), Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween, Easter cards cannot be funny, or satirical, as they signify such a serious religious holiday. They can just be cute.

But because Easter cards were popular, and there are so many of them still around from the 1880-1930 period, I did want to showcase a few of the more interesting images. The huge collection at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery has literally hundreds of cards of brightly dressed children popping out of huge eggs, which I have not included here. Instead, I’m offering bunnies doing interesting things (generally dressed like humans) and some international examples: very artistic bunnies from France, and some “Easter witches” from Scandinavia. Around World War I there were some oddly-militaristic Easter cards issued both in Germany (which had a huge greeting and postcard industry) and America, and I’ve included a few examples of these as well.

Juggling, smoking, baseball-playing bunnies, and an Easter “brigade”, from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery:

Two German Easter postcards (I assume for the Anglo-American market given the English wording) from the decade before World War One, featuring characters dressed in the distinctive Prussian military uniform. The juxtaposition of Easter greetings and soldiers seems kind of incongruous to me (especially in the first card, where the soldier-chicks are quite menacing), but at least it’s interesting.

Next up are two vintage Swedish cards featuring the traditional Easter witches or hags (paskkarringar). There are pre-Christian survivals mixed in the observance of most Christian holidays, and in Sweden (and parts of Finland, apparently) this cultural fusion is revealed most strikingly at Easter time. On Maundy Thursday, broom-flying, copper kettle-carrying hags flew to Blakulla, the remote Blue Mountain, to pay homage to the Devil (or some pagan God), and then made a quick turnaround to be in Church on Easter Morning! Swedish children traditionally dress up as paskkaringar two days before Easter, and visit their neighbors’ houses leaving “Easter letters” and requesting treats. Obviously one impact of this tradition was the production of LOTS of Easter greeting cards. You can see more here.

Finally, a couple of cards that I just like. A good old American unembellished, unaccompanied Easter Rabbit, and a pair of nicely-drawn French bunnies with pussywillows.

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

April 13, 2011

The Crowninshield Elephant

By daseger

Western encounters with the eastern elephant commenced with the display of its military might in the ancient era and intensified after the Crusades. Before the eighteenth century, Europeans had few opportunities to see an elephant, but they had been exposed to elephants in lore and legend and script and print for years. They could read (or hear) about King Henry III’s elephant in the thirteenth century, Pope Leo X’s elephant in the sixteenth century, and the natural histories and travel narratives of the early modern era contained ample references and images to elephants, ever the symbol of the exotic east. So by the time we get to the later eighteenth century, there was certainly enough curiosity and demand to justify the effort and expense of bringing elephants to urban areas on both sides of the Atlantic where they could be seen (in the flesh) and touched.

Henry III’s Elephant (a gift from the French king Louis IX),from the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris, c. 1235-59. Parker Library, Corpus Christ College, Cambridge University

Pope Leo X’s Elephant (a gift from the Portuguese king Manuel I), c. 1515, from a drawing by Raphael

John Johnston, Historiae Naturalis, 1657

The man who brought the first elephant to America on April 13, 1796 (215 years ago today!) was Captain Jacob Crowninshield (1770-1805), future member of Congress and Secretary of the Navy appointee and a member of one of Salem’s most dynamic and upwardly mobile families. Within a century of their arrival in the America at the end of the seventeenth century, the German Kronenschiedt family had transformed themselves into the thoroughly American Crowninshield shipping dynasty, and they were on the verge of transforming their economic power into political and cultural influence in the new nation. Jacob was one of five Crowninshield brothers who maintained the family shipping business in the Federal era, bringing valuable international goods such as tea and pepper back to Salem. A Crowninshield ship, the Minerva, was the first Salem vessel to circumnavigate the globe in 1802. Though the Crowninshield Wharf no longer stands, three prominent Salem buildings still testify to the family’s wealth and influence in Salem’s golden era: the family’s first Salem homestead, the Crowninshield-Bentley House (1727-30) on Essex Street, the Crowninshield-Devereaux House (1806, designed by Samuel McIntire) on Salem Common, and the present day Brookhouse Home for Aged Women on Derby Street (1810-12).

View from Crowninshield Wharf, George Ropes Jr. Peabody Essex Museum

The Crowninshield-Devereaux House in 1941, HABS, Frank Branzetti, Photographer. Library of Congress

By all accounts, Jacob Crowninshield looked upon the elephant as an investment, and it was a good one. After docking in New York City with the young (2 or 3 years depending on the source; she certainly grew considerably after her arrival in America) Indian elephant which had purportedly cost him $450, he sold her to a Philadelphia man named Owen for $10,000. Owen and his partners put the nameless elephant on tour, and you can follow her progress up and down the eastern seaboard through the newspapers. The first notice below is from a newspaper in Aurora, New York, while the illustrated broadside (from the Peabody Essex Museum, but available in digital form at Salem State’s Landmarks of American History website: Becoming American: Trade, Culture and Reform in Salem, Massachusetts, 1801-1861) indicates that the elephant was on display in Boston (and later Salem) in the late summer of 1797, 18 months after its arrival in America. And after Crowninshield’s elephant, a succession of elephants (Old Bet, Little Bet, Columbus) went on tour until about 1820, after which the Asian elephant was viewed as decidedly less exotic.

Advertisement for the Elephant Columbus in the Boston Columbian Centinel, December 13, 1817

P.S. If you want to hear another version of the story of Crowninshield’s elephant, you can download “Captain Crowninshield” from the Philadelphia band Cheers Elephant’s cd Man is Nature.