Artistic New England-Connections with Bruce Magnuson

Artistic New England- Unveiling the region’s artistic tapestry in literature, painting and sculpture.

Part I

New England is a region rich in history, culture and natural beauty, so it is not surprising that many artists have lived and made art here. In this first part of a series, we will look at some writers, painters and patrons with connections to each other and New England. We will travel to various locations throughout New England that were their home and/or inspiration. To start with; Edith Wharton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter and Childe Hassam. Being sponsored by libraries, we will also highlight some of the many books that are relevant to the artists, themes and locations.

Hi folks welcome we’ll get started in another minute or so all right hi everyone my name is Gian I’m one of the reference Librarians here at the chumford public library uh thank you so much for joining us for tonight’s program artistic New England connections with Bruce Magnuson our presenter um New

England is a region rich in history culture and natural beauty so it is not surprising that many artists have lived and made art here in the first part of a series we will look at some writers painters and patrons with connections to each other and New England we will

Travel to various locations throughout New England that were their home and or inspiration to start with ED Edith Wharton Isabella Stewart Gardner Sarah or JWT Celia thxer and chill tsam being sponsored by libraries we will also highlight some of the many books that are relevant to the artist

Themes and locations so without further Ado I’m going to pass it over to our presenter Bruce thank you so much Gian welcome everyone on this Chile New England evening to talk about some of the art in our area so first of all thanks to chenford for hosting this in Giana and the

Co-sponsors of this are gron Library Groveland library and TB Library all members of the marac Valley Library Consortium so thank you so much and I kind of start out uh with a little Geographic centering here as to where we are what we’re going to be talking about and typically these presentations one of

The beauties of Zoom is we get to have people all over the place I see somebody already said they’re from Westport Connecticut so if you want to pop in the chat um where you’re from I’m not assuming everybody is intimately familiar with New England but um this is

Kind of a grounding of really New England here what we’re looking at and what we’re going to be talking about here I am in beautiful Chelmsford 30 or so Miles northwest of Boston we’re going to be venturing out to the birkar out to Lennox we’re going to be in the Boston

Cambridge area and then we’ll shoot up north uh to Southern Maine here in South Berwick and off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire in the aisles of scholes so I do see most folks here from the New England Area North Carolina however New Jersey I’m heading down to New York tomorrow

And uh Utah okay Charleston South Carolina wow it’s always amazing the breath of folks we get in Zoom so we’ll hop into it here and uh kind of give you a overview of what our program is going to be like tonight as GI mentioned at the beginning we’re going to be covering

Um these artists and patrons uh when I kind of put this together I didn’t really have a theme of focusing on women however that’s how it did kind of come about so the time frame we’re talking about is pretty much the late 1800s and the early 1900s so the fact that we have

A significant amount of women artists and patrons is actually not the norm so that’s fairly exciting and we’re going to start off with Isabella Stewart Gardner move over to eth Wharton author and then another author Sarah orjt and a poet and uh non-fiction writer Celia thxer Celia

Lon thaxter and we’ll finish off with the lone man in the group child Hassam who is American impressionistic painter and they’ll do kind of a summary of what we’re talking about so if you do have any questions I’ll T try and uh kind of

Take a look at the Q&A as we go from section to section if you have any as we go along because we are going to kind of you know talk about these people separately although you know the overarching theme Here is connections so I’m going to talk about how these folks

Inter related during this time frame and a couple of other major artists who were kind of in the the spoke of the wheel here when we talk about the relationships among these folks so we’ll start off with Isabella Stewart Gardner um born in 1840 and died in

1924 the image on the right is a portrait of her that’s in the gardener Museum in Boston’s Fenway that was painted by John Singer Sergeant he’s certainly one of the gentlemen that we’ll be talking a lot about tonight as far as his influence and interaction with these folks um so Gardner was

Actually born in New York and she married Jack Gardner she was known as Mrs Jack um from Boston so she moved up from New York to Boston and that became bone of contention this is um I would say this is prior to the Yankees Red Sox rivalry but um actually

She was a huge Red Sox fan so the Red Sox W in play here but the New York Boston thing was real and she was quasi ostracized from society Boston Society the brahin um she was from New York that wasn’t really that was frowned upon but

They lived at 152 Beacon Street and uh un fortunately her only son passed away in a with an illness I think it was scarlet fever um just before his second birthday and she was not able to have any more children so she is this you

Know um rich woman in Boston um you know the focus at that time was children and and child rearing and all that stuff and she couldn’t do that so what she ends up devoting herself to is to traveling and acquiring art and so she ends up um

Accumulating this and the the house at 152 Beacon Street um starts to kind of Bulge at the edges and so she does convince her husband to buy the house next door and expand into that which they do um but it keeps keeps growing and keeps acquiring and as a result um

She ends up with this Museum but um in the course of that she is acquiring these items and she’s not doing it on her own but she is traveling and so you’ll see that as a theme with a couple of these folks here that are Intrepid Travelers and so she certainly is that

And she also has contact with um some pretty Heavy Hitters in the art world one of them is Charles Elliot Norton who was a professor at Harvard and he basically was the first American professor of art history so he becomes a very very big Confidant of hers and he

Um she attends lectures once again she was pretty much the only woman who was attending these lectures um she becomes very involved in this um uh subject matter of Art and then Bernard baronson uh is a contact she has in Boston he kind of Becomes Her agent over in Europe

And acquires a lot of The Works um that she does acquire and currently reside in the gardener Museum and with her status and Society she does host and hobnob with many of the little r of the age uh like I said she was an eccentric you know she would

Wear a red sock paraphernalia which certainly was not something that was dgor for somebody of her status back in the early 1900s um there’s a famous uh New Year’s Eve party she had where she had champagne and donuts uh Edith Wharton who something we’ll talk about next um attended that and was not

Impressed and Edith Wharton also came from New York Society so you see kind of these crosscurrents that that come amongs these people and as I mentioned her travels The Gardener actually had a uh exhibit back in the spring that focused on her travels she was a um an

Interesting woman in the fact that she created um these travel journals that were Illustrated with pictures so photography you know was a thing it wasn’t certainly as easily accessible as it is today but still you know it wasn’t you know all didn’t have to bring your

You know huge camera with a black hood and everything to take a picture there was some portability to it so she had a lot of images and she created these books and they exist and so this exhibit at the uh at the gardener back in the spring highlighted a lot of these things

And one of them that we’re going to talk about um fairly in detail is Italy um she spent a lot of time in Italy and a lot of time traveling in Italy but as you can see from the map here you know she was everywhere from Mexico

Certainly a lot of Europe um a lot of Asia which is you know pretty extreme she’s in India she’s out in IND Indonesia she’s in Japan so she is incredibly well traveled and that absolutely plays into a lot of the stuff that she acquires for the gardener

Museum in a place that she meets a lot of these folks and these crosscurrents of artist is at the platoo Barbaro which is in Venice on the Grand Canal and it’s actually was owned owned by a couple from Boston Daniel and Ariana Curtis and it was kind of like an early Airbnb in

The fact that folks could basically rent it out and obviously you had to have some means and so this became a place that was very very um systematically occupied by a whole mess of folks in the time frame we talking about and a lot of these people were in the Arts we have

Our man John Singer Sergeant Henry James is also another person the author Henry James an American off born in in New York once again but he ended up being an ex expatriate and live no of his time over in Europe um JS James mcneel wiler who was actually from LOL Although he

Really didn’t want that to be he couldn’t avoid it but uh he tried to get away from it and so once again he was an ex Patriot and he lived over in Europe for most of his life Robert Browning the poet and Claude Monae of course the famous impressionistic

Painter so you have a lot of these friends cycling through this pazo in Venice and Isabelle’s over there and so she is interacting with these folks and you know once again all the crosscurrents are kind of producing a lot of interesting discussions and so I did have the uh

Privilege of being in Venice uh this spring and uh the danieli hotel was one of the more famous hotels there it dates back to the 14th century it wasn’t a hotel back then I it was a monastery or something but the building itself B dates back to the 14th century um just

For reference I believe at the time we were there in April the uh rates were around $2,000 a night for a room at the hotel danielli um Neil to say we were not staying there but I wanted to see the inside so I drag my family down

There and um it’s one of these places where you walk in there’s a sign that basically says you know you can’t move go any further unless you’re um staying here but fortunately the guy at the front desk was very nice and he let us in and so as we were walking around in

The lobby I’m looking up going like oh my gosh this is the gardener Museum um uh Courtyard and so we’ll see that in the second but uh this is you know kind of what Isabella is designing her Museum on so her museum is the Isabella Stewart Garder Museum over here in The Back

Fence of Boston um this is the Museum of Fine Arts this is Huntington Avenue here route n so basically kind of diagonally across um is the gardener Museum and this is the fence here with actually a lot of lot of monuments here I talked about in a previous presentation or

Right across the muddy river here but this is where she builds it and at the time you know the late 1800s early 1900s um this is basically kind of swamp land um but you know she needs the space um uh at this point I believe her husband

Has passed away he died relatively early um so she begins construction on this uh Italian Villa in the F of Boston and so it opens in 1903 at the time that she was alive it was known as Fenway Court it doesn’t become the Isabella Stewart Garden of museum until

After she passes away in 1924 so you see once again that the courtyard yard here I was alluding to at the you see at the hotel danielli this is actually the gardener Museum and as I was chatting with GI before this program started this is an amazing place to go

At this time of year since it is truly an oasis um we have the cold and darkness here in in Eastern New England and this place is just amazing with the light pouring in and the vegetation and everything else so it’s really quite a space and uh it is a great space for

Photography and the light coming in and you can say it’s very distinctive you know Italian Venetian architecture here with the windows um all this kind of ornamentation everything is all very Venetian and she also collects a lot of art that is related to Italy and to

Venice and this is the Leo which is in the lagoon uh that Venice shares and it’s by theth the artist Ralph Ralph warly Curtis in 1884 returned from the Leo uh but the pie of resistance that still is in the garden or that wasn’t stolen in the the the heist in the early

1990 I think it was um is the rape of Europa by tishan and tishan is was a Venetian Renaissance artist this is from 1562 and it is in a room that is named the tishan room at the gardener so it’s a very eclectic Museum eclectic probably undersells it it’s an incredibly um

Different Museum um it’s is her collection you know they’re not organized together as you normally would with normal quote unquote normal museums um it’s a fascinating one to kind of wander around it is difficult to V visit on the weekends because it is very very crowded and there aren’t a lot of if

Kind of like any really name plates or anything that with the artwork so it can be kind of difficult to see this stuff a lot of it’s small it’s a lot of exent you know Ecentric how she could organize the stuff but it is an absolutely fascinating place to

Visit and our friend John Singer Sergeant was a um uh she was a patron of his and like I say we had a couple of different self portraits that were done by sergeant of Garder but this is a very very large um painting that is pretty much near the entry entryway when you

First come into the museum you kind of have these people looking at to give it a bit of scale L Alo um by John Singer Sergeant 1882 it’s a flamco scene in Spain very dramatic um I have to say from my perspective kind of my favorite Sergeant because he was obviously noted

For portraits which we’ll get to at the end of the presentation but um this one is just fascinating with subject matter and its uh construction and it darkness and it’s a it’s a beautiful painting and it is absolutely ginormous as you come into the entryway and so she’s ended up uh buried

In the gardener Crypt in Mount Auburn Cemetery so another connection we have with uh a few of the folks in here is Mount Orban Cemetery which as we’ll see here is in Cambridge this is the cemetery here see this is Harvard Square clever enough Mount Auburn Street actually ends up in

Mount Auburn Cemetery and uh right by Fresh Pond once again an Urban Oasis um I will say you know get one of the maps of the cemetery if you go there because these things are are devilishly complex as you go through here looking for various grades but it was the first

Garden Museum a garden um cemetery in the United States it was uh constructed 1839 so it is a beautiful beautiful um I said Oasis it is a cemetery but you know it’s got beautiful trees and Landscape architecture Forest Hills which is um and south of auson um was one that comes

A bit later but there was two of the first Garden cemeteries uh in the United States and as a photographer it’s one of my favorite places to photograph so these are a couple of uh infrared images infrared black and white images taken in the summer this one’s actually Mary

Baker Eddie the founder of Scientology that’s her tomb here with the reflection in the lake this is the famous Sphinx so it’s it’s got I mean you go to this place like I said is kind of a you know a maze and you do particularly when the

Trees are in bloom you know you can’t see stuff if you kind of turn the corner and there’s a very fascinating uh type of uh Memorial to somebody and uh it makes for really cool photography pretty much in all four seasons it’s the beauty

Of it too is it’s a since it’s a garden cemetery you get the flowers in the spring you obviously have your Fall Foliage we have here in New England um in the summer it has tremendous amount of trees and infrared photography is really really good in the summer because

You really kind of want a lot of foliage so you have these two shots here which accentuate that with the leaves on the tree kind of turn white when you go uh infrared and you have kind of the topi area here that plays off against the chapel so it’s a very very beautiful

Place and can also give a cemeteries do a bit of ominous to it and this was taken in the fall the leaves late fall as the leaves are off the trees and um oh some correct to me I said Scientology right it’s Christian Science not Scientology I apologize with Mary Baker

Eddie it was Christian Science um so you see here the leaves are off the trees you kind of have these you know Vines hanging down and uh you can get some really really interesting auras here from the cemetery so with the different seasons they said you can get very very

Different perspectives of the cemetery and it’s a a pretty neat place to go and a lot of people famous people um were buried there as I mentioned Mary Baker Eddie chrisen science uh architect B Buckminster Fuller you go anywhere from not all these are artists you have BF Skinner

The psychologist Charles bullfinch the architect Kurt gouty the sportscaster um then you do have RS like winsel Homer but there’s a lot of famous people p uh buried there and I would be remissed if I don’t say the very famous photographer out of MIT minor white is buried there

So it’s a it’s interesting place and as I mentioned before I do want to kind of highlight some of the books that are related to these folks that we talk about and there are no shortage of books about uh Isabella um and recent ones Gondola days is a book that came out

About 10 or so years 20 years so years ago that talks about the plots of Barbaro and the circle of uh intellectuals and artists that frequented that place um there is a recent biography that just came out that was written by two people who are believe one’s a curator maybe both

Curators at the gardener Museum and came out in 2022 relatively short biography and gives you a good review of her life um a novel that came out this year the Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin um it’s a fictional account of Garder this is one of the more interesting ones is

The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner like I mentioned the museum is very eclectic and this book kind of plays on that and it’s a bit of a stream of Consciousness book and it goes through weaves through kind of some of the themes and the objects that are in

The Gardener Museum and it gave me a more of an appreciation of how the next time I go back to the Garden I really need to pay attention a lot more to what’s in that Museum and then uh the kind of standard biography that came out

About 50 years ago almost 60 years ago was Mrs Jack um by Lewis Hall Tharp that was the kind of um standard biography until some of the more recent ones come out but it’s as fascinating place so with that we will switch over to edth Wharton and uh probably the one

That people are most familiar with uh famous author she once again was born in New York City she does end up becoming an exat and dies in France um she was the first woman to win a puler prize for fiction which she did in 1921 for the

Age of Innocence um she didn’t actually publish her first book until she was 40 years old she ends up publishing 15 novels seven nelas and 85 short stories and as I mentioned with Isabella she is a very Intrepid traveler and people have tell that she traveled across the

Atlantic Ocean um at least 60 times and of course this is all by boat um there was no airplane travel when she was doing her traveling so that’s a lot of transatlantic crossings so I would this is a four-minute video from PBS that kind of gives an overview of her

And talks a little bit about the mount her house out in Lennox which we’ll delve into a little more deeply even today Edith Wharton occupies a place as one of America’s leading literary ladies she was born into the Upper Crust of old New York in the mid

1800s a member of high society who ALS exposed it through the prism of her pen Wharton wrote more than 40 books in 40 years including Ethan FR and the Age of Innocence for which she became the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction today she is also remembered for

Her home the mount and if ever a house could serve as an autobiography the mount is it situated on a hill overlooking a lake in Len Massachusetts the mount was conceived by the writer from the ground up she dreamed its location guided its aesthetic principles and

Design her elaborate Gardens it was in a sense her own house of Mirth which she wrote while living here and this house was an opportunity for her to really do things the way she thought they ought to be done and that was to really Champion a return of classicism symmetry balance

Proportion uh lots of light and and really opening up spaces and to make them livable we spoke with the mount Kelsey Mullen in Wharton’s drawing room The house’s largest room when it was built in 1902 she used it to entertain frequent guests like fellow writer Henry James they were very very good friends

Um and she she matched him in literary skill I think towards the end Wharton designed her home practically no space went unused it was large but not Grand and it favored her predeliction for privacy despite carefully crafted images of Wharton as a writer stay in her Library she actually wrote elsewhere

Edith Wharton had always done her best work writing in bed that was where the creative genius uh inspired her and so I think in building the mount she created a a space where she could have the Privacy she needed to get her best work done she did love her library though and

A full two-thirds of her collection has been returned to the Mount what is her Library tell us about her it’s been a remarkable window into Edith Wharton’s intellectual life she was reading across genres really a voracious learner and she was reading in five different languages sometimes ancient Norse when

She when she was feeling up for a challenge she was reading books on astronomy and um theology her books are riddled with marks notations and destruction dismayed with one Publisher’s choice to feature illustrations in one of her books she found a remedy in her own copy of the

House of Mirth uh you can see on the title page she has crossed out the name of the illustrator in pencil and then there all of the illustrations have been razored out of the book amazingly Wharton considered herself a better landscape Gardener than novelist although that’s slightly less

Astonishing when you see her Gardens which fully recreated appear as Wharton saw them she built the Garden in stages as she was receiving advances from her books um and it was during that time that she’s taking these European ideas and placing them in an American context and fitting together a French garden

With an Italian Garden and an English lime walk all on the shores of a Massachusetts Lake all of this is a welcome second chapter to the mount’s history threatened with foreclosure just 5 years ago the home has managed to climb out of its fiscal hole and is now

Running in the black a footing regained today the mount is positioning itself as the berkshire’s literary Hub drawing the attention of writers the world over its Champions also include former first lady Laura Bush who first fell in love with Ethan FR as a West Texas school girl

People read Wharton and realize that in fact while a lot has changed a lot is still very much the same and she just is so clean and muscular in the way that she sort of expresses it and observes it that um her writing is as relevant today

As it ever was meaning this is Edith Wharton’s renewed age of resonance okay so we’ll kind of once again level set where we are here this is Western Massachusetts Berkshire County and this is Lennox um Lennox was actually known as the Inland Newport so there were 60 plus mansions in the area

I don’t think I don’t know maybe only a hand fill still exist but in his Heyday in late 1800s and early 1900s there were a lot of mansions in lenx so it wasn’t you know just some sort of random place that she she chose she did build she

Does built it in 198 build it 198 1902 and only lived there till 1911 where she moved to France and after World War I CH comes back to America once which is to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale but back to the connection part the interesting thing is the family she buys

The land from is actually John Singer Sergeant’s family so um she buys the land for this uh house um from them and builds it from scratch as the video shows we’ll get more into that a second it’s actually very key to what uh she ends up doing and as soon as you walk

And this is the entrance actually the back of the house um but you come in this way as you come in the door there is this plaque that said this house was built in 1902 by Edith Wharton so no shortage of humility I guess but um it is a beautiful place and once

Again it’s a beautiful place in the summer for infrared photography um and it’s you know the gardens are amazing we’ll get a little bit more into that and you can see very French in this you know stuff about very similar to like Luxenberg Gardens uh the way that

The trees are sculpted and this is an archway it looks actually out over the lake and these are some more of the the beautiful trees and I was out there just a few weeks ago and this is how it looks in late Autumn and most of the leaves

Have fallen but it’s it’s a beautiful place and it’s got beautiful grounds that’s one of the really really Charming things about it um the house itself as we’ll see in a second is certainly beautiful but uh you know as they mentioned that she was kind of considered her landscape skills uh more

Than her literary skills and this is certainly a beautiful place and they’ve been able to restore it as I mentioned in the video this place has gone through a lot of iterations um as people have heard me talk before I grew up in Al around Albany New York which is actually

Fairly close to the Burks years and for years this was actually the home of a Shakespeare company called Shakespeare and Company which is still out in linnux but this was their performance space for about 20 years and then it became a separate Excuse Me Foundation in around

2001 I think and they had to put in a lot of renovation they had to actually put in some steel beams it was actually all Wood Construction and they put some like stuck all over it but the actual construction the uh the bones so to speak of the house are actually wood but

It was kind of falling apart so they ended up putting some steel beams in it in the lower part of it uh but at this point now it’s very well we stored um some of the rooms don’t have a lot of furniture they’re actually Museum type

Rooms uh but you can go into a lot of it you can go down into the basement you can see the kitchen areas we’ll see in a second but it’s h it’s quite a beautiful spot and the first book she has published is the decoration of houses in

1897 and um he she co-wrote it with Ogden Codman Jr who’s an architect and it’s still used today there’s actually a book is reference at the end that you know talks about the principles that were put with this and they’re still being uh adhere to today

So she was very very into the interior and as they talked about you know the house is nice but not Grand and so one of her famous quotes is thus all good architecture and good decoration which it must never be forgotten is only internal architecture must be based on

Rhythm and logic a house or a room must be planned as it is because it could not in reason be otherwise must be decorated as it is because no other decoration would harmonize as well with the plan so her Library um you know is a beautiful space and this is a picture of

You know when she was there and this is it today and as the video said they were able to get back a large portion of her library because it had been dispersed to the winds after she left and different owners took over and the house went through all different kind of gations

And so her library was kind of um you know I was to dispersed or one person had it but they were able to reacquire it I think around 2006 for it was in the millions of dollars but they were able to get it and like the video said

There’s a lot of her annotations in it so from a scholarship perspective um it’s critical and uh it’s amazing to have that kind of resource at the house today and this is one of the upstairs hallways kind of the best representation of what she’s talking about as far as

You know kind of a human scale of architecture um obviously it’s very nice any hallway I have but um you know it’s not you know Newport Breakers type thing um so it is it is beautiful and and uh it does have a very nice vibe to

It and this was um her writing ER well once again they kind of set up as her writing area as a video said she actually wrote in bed this is kind of interesting the fact this is in the dining room and this was a painting that is actually plastered into the wall and

So when she left the house she had a choice to either leave it there or basically have it chiseled out and removed and she end up uh ended up having leaving it there but unfortunately her husband Teddy warten who is from the family of the Wharton School of Business business at upen um

He had a lot of mental issues and their marriage kind of fell apart and she ended up going to they end basically leaving the house and she end up going to France and they end up getting divorced and as mentioned Henry James was a very very very close friend of

Hers so there’s one of the rooms there which doesn’t really have a lot of furniture in it has some Museum stuff and talks about different things that happen with the house but there was a plaque outside it was a Henry James guest room and they were very close

Henry James was a big correspondent with Isabelle Stewart Gardner um you know Edith Wharton was a legitimate intellectual you saw from that video that you know she’s reading an Old Norse she you know was fluent like five languages you know reading science so she’s a legitimate intellectual Isabella

Stewart Gardner was not um at least under that criteria so Henry James does have some letters he’s a little bit dismissive of of gardener of being you know kind of the rich woman who’s you know not really you know a bonified artist and which he’s not um but a

Little bit condescending from Henry James and that’s what I’ve heard about Henry James that’s not really out of uh character for him so as I mentioned this is the kitchen I always love the kind of the inard of these houses and this was actually from her bedroom with an old

Telephone looking out over the landscape in late Autumn and as I mentioned uh so isab Edith Warton has no shortage of books um I do find obviously talking about the mount this book The decoration of houses is very pertinent and this is a a book

That just came out a few years ago go that uses this calls the classical principles of modern design lessons from edth Warton and a c’s decoration of houses um so I was published in 2018 that book itself was 1897 she was from New York her most famous books do talk about New York

Society but she did write books that are based on the bir shear and two of the more famous ones their novellas is Ethan fro which I think most people have to cycle through at some point in their High School career uh written in 1911 and summer was written in 1917 and of

Course the one that she won the PO surprise with 1921 was Age of Innocence so before we go on I’ll take the questions as uh somebody put into the Q&A about could I tell us about infrared photography yeah I do struggle with um showing those images and having explain

What infrared is but uh I don’t want to spend too much time on it except for the fact that um infrared is you know look at the electromag magnetic Spectrum there’s visible light and then there’s the infrared um part of it and there’s lots of different infrared wavelengths

The ones that are closest to the visible spectrum are ones that you can do for photography the ones that are further away are the typical infrared you get with when you do like heat sensing you have a picture of your house taken you can see where it’s losing heat and stuff

Like that thermal pictures that’s using infrared but for photography you can get a you can get your camera alter because all cameras have a filter on it that filters out infrared because infrared radiation can do clouding effects onto your regular visible light images so I have a camera that is converted

Specifically for infrared a digital camera um their old age you could do it with film it was incredibly difficult had to be very long exposures um so digital infrared is is is not easy but it’s heck of a lot easier than film and I like it for summer because it gives

You a very different effect and typically in summer uh midday is not ideal from a lighting perspective and with infrared it’s ideal because you want to have a lot of basically energy that’s how what shows up on the image is energy and so if you don’t take it you know during the height

Of the day they become dull But A nice bright sunny day with a lot of good kind of foliage willow trees are a favorite of mine for infared know they have the the looping leaves and everything else um so uh that is um explanation of that

And one of the uh question is the Codman house uh and Lincoln match related I don’t know if that is related to to uh to our friend Ogden um I don’t know that’s interesting question look into that so now we’ll move to the main coast

And a little bit Inland to Sarah orjt um the author who was born 1849 and dies in 1909 um she’s a doc she’s a daughter of a country doctor she has rheumatoid arthritis from an early age um she is known for her regionalist style probably

Somebody that not a lot of folks may be familiar with she focuses on Southern m um and then after Annie Field’s husband’s death James field he was a publisher and we’ll get to him in a second um she becomes jwt’s lifelong companion and she was the first woman to

Be given an honorary doctorate from Bowden so we have Edith getting it from Yale and Sarah orun getting it from Bowden uh South Berwick here is on the interior about 10 miles off the coast or Inland off the coast of York Maine um off of the Salmon River I believe that’s

A tributary to pcwa that goes into Portsmouth where the harbor of Portsmouth basically is and the Great Bay over here near do so I grew up spending a lot of my summer actually on York Main and on the coast of York Main for about five weeks every summer my grandfather had a

Cottage there and I have to admit I don’t think I ever stepped foot in South Berwick until last year but um quite little town and this is her house it was built in 1774 and it’s currently owned by the historic New England organization as properties they have uh

I don’t know 20 or so properties within New England and uh you know it’s a it’s a obviously well-to-do house her father was a doctor um you know it’s stepped down from the mount as far as as far as entations goes but he’s right on the the

Center of town of Burwick uh South Berwick this is right on the Main Street um so it’s had a prominent place from when it was built in 1774 and you can see from the wallpaper um this is somebody with means um I believe this wallpaper was created from patterns that

They were able to find um I always find this fascinating when you go into these older houses and ask about how they came up with some of this stuff and um it is kind of crazy how they can reproduce some of this stuff most of it obviously

Is not original because you’re not going to get the kind of vibrancy of colors from something that’s 2 150 years old but there are a lot of these patterns were based on stuff in Europe or actually bought from Europe and so they have a way of doing their detective work

And coming up with this and restoring it so it’s it’s a beautiful beautiful place and being an author there’s a lot of books around a lot of areas and Cubbies that you can write stained glass window that overlooks the property and in her bedroom right outside her bedroom she had a writing

Desk this is where she did most of her work this is the portrait um of her not painted by John Singer Sergeant um but um it is a portrait of jwi in her lifetime and this is one of the more interesting things that I have to say

I’m fairly proud I got a photo of this this is actually her initials that she car D into the window in her bedroom with a diamond and like I mentioned she had rheumatoid rheumatoid arthritis so she was actually you know had a lot of challenges throughout her life or

Mobility and things along those lines and then um I think about nine years or so before her life um before um she passes away she is in a carriage accident and that effectively ends her writing career and so she’s pretty much for most part most um uh ways of looking

At she’s bedridden so she spends a l lot of time in this bedroom and so they have this you know original obviously original pane of glass that she carved her initials into it and um I won’t get into the nuances of what lens I used

Took take this picture with but it was a kind of a funky lens that gives you selective focus and I was able to get it so just selectively focused on that when you take it with a regular camera when you have autofocus it becomes very difficult to focus on something like

This in the window because the autofocus will want to go and focus on something outside so um kind of have to do manual focus for that so her famous most famous work is a Nolla called the country of the pointed Furs so this is my representation of

Pointed Furs if you ever been spending any time in Maine um pointed furs are not too hard to come by um full disclosure these are further north in Maine they’re up more around aadia than they are down by Southern Maine but um obviously this one’s actually um up on

Cadillac Mountain so you can get a really good perspective of the pointed furs with the the ocean in the background but um that’s what she’s dealing with and so her most two most famous books are a country doctor which is basically a semi autobiographical uh book where she was a

Country she was the daughter of a country doctor um the main character of this is a woman who wants to become a doctor and does become a doctor and it goes into you know kind of all the sexism with that and it talks about you know women are telling her this main

Character Nan like you know how can you be a doctor that’s not Woman’s Work all this kind of stuff so she’s talking about that they’re mostly you know the characters this one in particular the country that the pointed F she gets into the vernacular um some of the actual um

Characters you know speak in vernacular it is interesting to have some of these things know with now with audio books and things along those lines you can have them read and uh it is interesting experience to actually have that happen and these you know these um actors basically who do these readings

Are phenomenal and they will take on the characters they will take on the different cadences um it’s really interesting so from a regional perspective I found them interesting the fact that I spend a lot of time in Southern Maine this is kind of a different perspective there are

Certainly you know um ocean type things one of the the stories in the country that the pointed first is there’s a sea captain he tells stories of being Shipwrecked so there is that but it’s not overtly like you know most of the books about Maine do Focus on the coast

Obviously and this does talk about that but gets a little more Inland you have more Farmers you know that kind of stuff so it gives you a very interesting depiction of what southern Maine was like in the late 1800s um so and and they’re short but I said they they do

Lack plot I will say that and as I mentioned so her lifelong partner after um Amy fields’s husband passes away um and James field and Annie end up with this basically this publishing house called tickner and Fields And so as you can imagine they’re publishing folks so by publishing stuff

They come into a lot of contact with a lot of these artists and um she has a salon you’ll see this a lot of these you know folks have salons we’ll see this next with CIA faxer um but she has a house on 146 Charles Street in Boston

And that becomes a salon and a gathering of artists mostly writers um and you do have once again you know Isabelle Stewart carder involved she does have certainly dinners at her house and Annie fields and her husband are guest guests um Celia faxer who will get to in a

Second the poet and author off of appledore she is there you have the author Willa Cather um a lot of Henry James once again pops up rard Kipling Harry Peter Stow know Mark Twain just a lot these just amazing amount of folks from the 1800s of kind of the who’s who

In a lot of ways of American literature and she is buried in Mount Orban Cemetery so we’ll move on now to Celia thxer and she was born 183 5 and passes away in 1894 and she is a daughter of a Lighthouse Keeper um name is Thomas Leighton and he was the Lighthouse

Keeper at uh White Island if you’re familiar we’ll get to these in a second of the Isles of scholes but the lighthouse out the Isles of scholes is white Island and he was the Lighthouse Keeper out there and back in those days the Lighthouse Keeper was actually a politically appointed position which I

Don’t think a lot of folks are aware of but I think he ran for governor of New Hampshire or some political office didn’t win but he ended up getting an appoint point is Lighthouse Keeper so cyia thra grows up on this island and this island is Tiny I think she has four

Or five siblings you know it’s a typical New England Lighthouse with just basically rocks and a little TFT of of green grass and so she ends up spending her childhood there but her father is an Intrepid entrepreneur so he ends up opening a hotel I believe in the 1840s on one of

The the largest island in the is of shs which is appledore and he opens up a hotel called the appor hotel which is revolutionary in the fact that most of these hotels that you know end up going into the um uh White Mountains certainly up in Bar Harbor in Maine ater rondex in

New York all these things that come after the Civil War for people to get away from the Heat and the stifle you know the industrialization all stuff that’s happening in the cities you know people want to have their summer resits on people with means and so they go to

These different places he has a place that’s actually before the Civil War so one of the first ones and so she ends up basically living there she marries her tutor Levi foxter who was intellectual from Boston and he introduces her to a lot of cultural luminaries and she is first published by

James and Annie Fields so that’s how she comes to know Annie fields and and uh by turn Sarah orjt some of her famous books Pros books are among the Isles of Sholes in an island garden and a salon does develop at appledore so once again some of the

People we’ve seen from the previous um uh Annie fields we see Nathaniel hawar we see John Green Le Wittier the poet Henry wsw withth Longfellow the actor Edward Thomas booth and the painter who will end our program with child hosome so appledore is interesting in

The fact the Isles of sches are the set of I think it’s like nine or so islands off the coast of Main in New Hampshire and the state line actually divides these islands so the ones to the north are in Maine the one to the South are in

New Hampshire so appor which is the largest go over here um that is in Maine the one today that you can visit most most readly is Star Island it has the oceanic house which is a hotel um that’s actually in New Hampshire and the most infamous is smudy nose which I kind of

Talk about a little bit at the end of the part with um Celia is where a famous murder happened uh in 1871 or 72 um but you can visit I mean all these places we’re going to um you know you can visit this is the hardest to see we we’ll see

A video on applore but Apple door is a little more you can get uh in the summer you can get daily boats go out to is to the Star Island uh but appor itself um doesn’t have a hotel anymore the hotel the hotel Burns early 1900s I believe um

So to actually see um Celia thaxter’s guard stuff like that which is still there um Tak a little bit of doing I was able to do it and we’ll talk about that but um this is a photograph of the uh hotel as you can see it’s you know quite

A complex here you end started with one and ended up with multiple buildings here as the hotel for appledore Island so it is quite a complex and unfortunately like most of these things they do end up burning down um the one that still exists is the Oceanic

Hotel and that was built in the 1870s or 1880s and so when you stay there uh literally the first half hour after you get off the boat they give you what is called the fire talk and they’re like you know we’re seven miles out at Sea there’s no fire department that’s going

To save us so if you light a cigarette you’re on the next boat home so they take it very seriously very seriously because the structure out on Star um the oceanic house um kind of well doesn’t look like any of these per se but the

Size is about that and you know you walk there and it’s just you know totally wooden structure from the 1870s it’s like how did it last so they’re very serious about making sure it continues to last so this is a a quick video from Chronicle Channel 5 for those of us in

The Boston area our lovely nightly resource of uh all things not not always New England but uh a lot of this focused on New England this is the story kind of Celia thxer and what’s going on to uh appledor today they float on the horizon just

With ins sight of land nine Islands 8 Miles off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine the Isles of Scholes access to these tiny Granite buttons is limited but one of these remote rocks the island of appledore is the unlikely location of a famous garden one that’s cultivated quite a following we have day tours that come and view the garden and people come out for about 4

Hours and they have a walking tour and they get to enjoy time in the garden and they have lunch in our dining hall that’s true of a lot of invasive species out here they Jennifer cie executive director of The sches Marine laboratory a field station on appledore run jointly

By the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University and because they are isolated on the island they haven’t met mixed with the other introduced apple trees on the mainland summer students here earn a semester’s credit in Just 2 weeks they’re really intensive classes but they’re fun cuz the students are not

In a lecture hall all day they’re out here but as the great Joanie Mitchell once said it’s time to get ourselves back to the garden and the lasting Legacy of one Celia faxer Celia grew up on a neighboring Island white Island in a lighthouse her dad was a Lighthouse

Keeper and they had a very small patch of land there so everything green was really precious to her so she fell in love with plants in fact Celia thxer published a book about coaxing such voluptuous blooms out of this bony soil today the garden is in the exact

Location with the exact flowers as described in the Island Garden book faxer planted her garden while working at the Apple door house along large Victorian air hotel that has since burned down a published poet faxer hosted many well-known writers and artists Emerson Hawthorne and most especially the painter child Hassam the

Garden is featured in most a lot of his work a lot of his early work especially Hassam fell in love with appledore returning time and again to capture its color texture and cast of light it continues to work its charms on artists today appledore in particular is been a

Destination for artists for over 100 years and I think that’s you know the same reasons artists come out here now is the reasons they came out there then which is that it’s it’s a very Elemental Place Chris vulpi is Artisan resident at the scholes Marine Lab as such he spends

Time with the students here lending his aesthetic sensibilities to their scientific Pursuits the trade-off vulpi gets a lot of alone time it’s amazing to be standing on a rock in the middle of an ocean with no one else in sight for hours on end absent civilization uh you get a little closer

To the elemental forces I think that that drive the planet and that drive us there are indeed Elemental forces at work on appledore just try not to be too alarmed at the roving bands of Youth armed with sticks no this isn’t Lord of the Flies students carry sticks to ward

Off goals protecting their newborn chicks and tours of Cecilia faxer Garden book so quickly that only one of them remains open this summer so I’m not sure that those tours um were since Co I don’t think they’re going anymore but I was able to go out out there uh to

Star Island number of years ago probably like 15 years ago or so on a photography Retreat um which they don’t do anymore either but um there’s are plenty of Retreats and various things you can do at Star Island throughout the summer and it’s not and they have accommodations out there different kinds of

Accommodations and it’s relatively easy to do that uh when I was out there they did um Charter aot to take us from Star to alador we had to spend an afternoon in appor and so this is Celia faur’s Garden I was there in kind of mid-september so they had plowed under

There were still a sunflower and you can see the kind of the Tower from the Marine laboratory but um it is pretty amazing and you look at it and how they’ve been able to resurrect that and it is a beautiful spot and is remote and um it’s interesting in the fact that in

KY on the mainland which if you go south of the outlets on Route One and KY there’s this tiny Museum called the kit historical and Naval Museum and it’s one of these kind of gems which I said I’ve been going to kit in my whole whole life

And didn’t stumble upon this until a couple years ago but they have an amazing amount of stuff crammed into this small Museum and they have a couple of um cases that are devoted to Celia thxer and they have these original things so she was a writer but she also

Hand painted pieces of China and also um Illustrated it’s illuminated volumes of her work maybe Illustrated volumes of her work with intricate flower design so they have actually Originals here and as the video mentioned child Hassam the famous painter they actually collaborated on a couple of things and

This is one of the uh Books A Christmas Story Of The Lost Bell that she wrote he Illustrated and this is one that she wrote and she herself Illustrated so you see these flowers these once again are sunflowers um that are on the pages of the book so it’s pretty amazing little

Gem there um just south of the outlets and all the chaos that’s in the outlets on Route One and you have this thing and as was mentioned um you know her famous Pros things are a memorable murder among the aisles of scholes in an island Garden now a memorable

Murder is what I alluded to at the beginning there is a a very Infamous murder that takes place on smudy nose in 1871 or 72 and SMY nose is basically adjacent to applore and one of the women who was killed actually worked at the appledore hotel that Cecilia’s father uh ran and

Owned so it was you know once again it seems like every five years we have a crime of the century but this was one of the crime of the one of the trials of the century um pretty much until um uh I can’t even think of the the woman in Fall River but

Um this gentleman Lewis Vagner is convicted and hanged and she writes a um a basically it’s like a 20 piece 20 Page piece on it and is considered one of the first examples of True Crime so it’s a you know 80-year predecessor to Truman capot in True Blood and once again she

Is you know she was on appledore when it happened the uh the murder happened in March and she was there the night this guy Rose out from Portsmith kills these two women and Rose back to Portsmith and it’s a a very complicated story and you know there’s no I Witnesses directly and

Everything else but she writes this true crime um considered one of the best Pros things in True Crime writing um in 1873 which once again is pretty revolutionary for a woman to do that and so we’ll finish up here by transitioning to what was referenced in the video is child

Hassam the American impressionist painter who is born in Boston in 1859 and dies in 1935 one of his famous paintings here is the Boston Common at Twilight and he did spend a lot of time on appledore so he spent many of his Summers um for a good you know 20 30

Years from 1886 to 1916 uh and he executed 250 to 300 Works um which ends up being about 10% of his lifetime output as an artist so these are some of the images from appledore and once again it’s a very dramatic you know landscape Seascape and the interesting thing is um there’s actually

A winter caretaker who stays over at Star Island throughout the winter and she’s been doing it for I want to say 25 years now and she’s a photographer Alexandra dor and she does have a Facebook page you can follow her and um it’s fascinating she’s out there

Kind of by herself I think her boyfriend’s out there with her sometimes but um it’s still a pretty desolate place and you can imagine we have this you know huge Windstorm coming up in a couple of days it’s going to be 50 to 60 M hour winds off the coast and I’m not

Sure you know being on Star Island would not be my first choice but it is is a dramatic place and so child Hassam spent a lot of time there and the day that I was on Apple door uh I had a few hours to kill and

You know it’s about 15 years ago and I I came across this picture and I am I don’t know if I was influenced by him or not um I just kind of amazed when I was putting together this presentation that you know this is a photograph I

Took this is one of his paintings and it’s just kind of uncanny that a lot of the same scene is there and what’s really interesting is kind of these yellow tinge almost I guess some sort of Len some sort of thing on the rocks and a little bit of green growing within the

Rocks and so you know these were done you know probably 70 or 80 years apart one in photography one in impressionistic painting but there’s certainly a lot of overlap there and once again this is midday which is typically you know in September midday is not your your great time to take uh

Photographs and you know full disclosure I was actually wandering around looking for shade because there’s not a lot of shade on the island there aren’t very many trees and so it was kind of Fairly hot that day and I was uh looking around and kind of stumbled upon this scene and

You know once again I’m not sure I had seen this picture before I don’t think I had but um it’s kind of interesting how they’re very similar and uh I kind of came across the same thing with this Inlet in the rocks and so another thing I stumbled upon uh

Looking for something different I was actually I last presentation I did was on Boston statues a few months ago and I was actually going down Columbus Avenue in Boston looking for the Harriet tutman statue which was the first statue um of a woman that was erected in the city of

Boston and walking down Columbus Avenue I come across child Hassam Park which I had never been aware of this is a private park right near where he was born and uh it’s this bucolic space that I guess is maintained by private money and there’s a little kind of relief

Sculpture of him and a plaque about it and it’s very wellmaintained and that was a very you know last summer was very hot and humid and this is certainly a very hot and humid day so it was a nice place to have a resit in the shade but

Um there’s still a a memorial a remembrance of child Hassam um and I’m sure that most people would not be aware that there’s actually a child housing Park in the city of Boston so um child hosam himself you know we’ve kind of come across some of these things of salons and various

Interactions among a lot of the Illumina of this particular era and one thing that child Hassan was very famous for was he didn’t kind of meet an art colony he didn’t like so New England um there was no shortage of art colonies in New England during the late 1800s early

1900s excuse me and he did attend a lot of them but one of the ones that he attended a lot was down in Connecticut and it’s the Florence Griswald house which is open to the public once again a beautiful beautiful spot in southern Connecticut um they have a

House or house there has been restored a lot of artwork in there um there are a couple of hams in there and various other artists who frequented that art colony with which went on for quite a while and Florence Griswald was a woman who kind of basically shepher that along

And there were our colonies in you know Provincetown there were our colonies up in a gunit um you know there our colonies all over the place in um in New England and um child Hassam shows up at a lot of them so if you want to end up

Do doing kind of another connections you can find out that child Hassam and art colonies is one that certainly comes up an awful lot and there are a few books on him not as many of the other folks but there was a book uh recently a a

Show that was done um I forget if it was done at the pbd S6 but there was a show done relatively recently of child Hassam in the Isles of scholes American impressionism and that’s the the book that associated with that and then it was a biography written of uh him in

2004 child Hassam so um and once again you know most maor museums the MFA you know the met in New York um child hos is certainly in the collection and usually on display so wrap it up with kind of a summary here and you know I was origin

Going to call this presentation a few degrees of Henry James but a I don’t know that much about Henry James um he’s kind of a you know kind of a I don’t know kogan I guess is the term you would use um and there’s just a lot of other

Interactions but when you do kind of boil down to it you know Henry James and John Singer Sergeant you know come up an awful lot and their interaction obviously very different people one’s a writer one’s a painter a singer being a Portrait Painter obviously you know

People had to have means order to have their pain uh their portraits painted by somebody like John Singer Sergeant so just by default he ends up interacting with a lot of different people um in that era and it’s just fascinating that you know we kind of have within this

Orbit all these very different people but you know some similarities and a lot of interaction and cross interaction to them and I’ll I’ll say full disclosure my wife is the one who put together this um illustration I was having challenging times with PowerPoint and PowerPoint was

Winning um so she was able to kind of uh put my ideas manifest my ideas better than I could um so I think it’s just interesting visual depiction of kind of what we’re talking about the kind of the cross-pollination interaction among these um kind of giants of of Art and as

Some may know there is a show of Sergeant work currently on view at the MFA in Boston it’s on view through dece excuse me January 15th um I have not yet seen it I hope to see it in the next month or so but it’s basically fashioned

By um sergeant and it kind of focuses on he would um basically kind of dictate what his models were wearing so he was kind of a control freak and so the exhibit does kind of cross um reference some of the original actual garments that were worn and some of the props he

Used with the actual paintings and so he does end up doing 900 oil paintings and over 2,000 watercolor paintings so there’s no short of John singor Sergeant work uh if you’re familiar with the Boston area he did do murals both in the Boston Public Library and in the Museum of Fine

Arts itself so there’s a lot of references to Mr Sergeant as you go through New England and specifically Boston he was born in Boston but did spend most of his time uh in London and Paris so he was truly an exp Patriot so uh where to find me um on

Instagram at at bmag photo my photography Facebook page is Bruce J Magnuson photography I do have a website at Bru Magnuson dosug mug.com and if you’re interested in a more uh a deeper dive into Venice I’ll be doing a zoom presentation for the carry library in Lexington in the middle of January in

The 17th at 7M you can register through their website and I’ll go into a little more detail into uh Venice and uh I was able to I was able to do Venice in April and it’s a a fascinating place and a place I couldn’t get my head around till

I actually went to and I still say it doesn’t make sense but it makes a little more sense now actually having been there so with that thank you so much for your attention um I’d be wor and welcome to answer any questions or at least attempt to answer any questions or

Anything else you might want to throw at me um not too much more infrared photography questions please I don’t think anybody wants to sit through that but anything else you have let me know okay let me just check the chat here okay somebody asked about the Sphinx at

The um why has Spinx honor Civil War dead at the um uh Mount Auburn Cemetery and I I knew the story of that before it is it’s dramatic because it’s right near the chapel um I forget the story and that’s the thing about the mount Orban Cemetery there are all these markers and

They have fabulous stories with them and a lot of them don’t jump out as being like very straightforward um so it’s an incredible place to wander around and find the stories but I don’t know the specific one of that somebody said they were missing my voice from time to time that’s bad

Oh somebody from Charles South Carolina there’s a child Hassam painting down there Lizzie bordon thank you thank you okay I don’t think I see any more questions so if that’s it is GI still there hang on hello all right everybody well thank you again so much for joining

Us tonight it’s been a pleasure as always Bruce um and yes please check out his future programs um I’m sure we’ll have him back here again soon as well so just keep an eye out on our um program calendar on our website or stop by the library and ask us some questions here

At the reference desk um thanks again Bruce for presenting for us we really appreciate it thank you good night have a good night everybody