Unveiling New England’s artistic tapestry in literature, painting and sculpture. Presented by Bruce Magnuson via Zoom on December 7, 2023. Sponsored by Chelmsford Public Library.
Hi everyone my name is Giana I’m one of the reference Librarians here at the Chumps 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 Garder Sarah or JWT Celia thaxter 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 over to our presenter Bruce thank you so much Gian and 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 gron Library Groveland library and tuxbury 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 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 and beautiful chelsford 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 Burwick and off the coast of Maine in
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 GA 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 Leon thxer and we’ll finish off with the lone man in the group child Hassam who is American impressionistic painter and
Then we’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 are 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 Garder Museum in Boston’s Fenway that was painted by John Singer serent 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 rival 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 unfortunately 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 of 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 she 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 they 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 is 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 littlear 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 deror 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 somebody we’ll talk about next um attended that and was not impressed and Edith Warden 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 highlight 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 and a place that she meets a lot of these folks and these crosscurrents of artists is at the platoo Barbaro which is in Venice on the Grand Canal and it’s actually was 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 are talking about and a lot of these people were in the Arts we have our man John Singer Sergeant Henry James was also another person the author Henry James actually an American auth born in in New York once again but he ended up being an ex exp Patriot and liveos of
His time over in Europe um Jes James mcneel Whistler 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 expatriate 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 is 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 uh interesting discussions and so I did have the uh privilege of being 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 $22,000 a night for a room at the
Hotel danielli um NE to say we were not staying there but I wanted to see the inside so I dragg 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 Gardener Museum over here in The Back Fence of Boston um this is the Museum of Fine Arts this is Huntington Avenue here Route 9 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 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 U 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 Gardener museum until after she passes away in 1924 so you see once again that the courtyard here I was alluding to at the you see at the hotel danieli 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 on 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 I 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 ofart 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 the the artist Ralph Ralph warly Curtis in 1884 returned from the Leo U
But the piece of resistance that still is in the garden that wasn’t stolen in 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 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 and 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 art work so it can be kind of difficult to see this
Stuff a lot of it’s small it’s a lot of eent you know eccentric how she’ organize this stuff but is 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 look at to give it a bit of scale L Alo um by John Singer
Sergeant in 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 its subject
Matter and its uh construction and its 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 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 cleverly enough Mount arburn Street actually ends up in Mount arburn 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 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 in 1839 so it is a beautiful beautiful um I
Said Oasis is a cemetery but you know it’s got beautiful trees and Landscape architecture um Forest Hills which is um and south of Austin 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 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 somebody corrected 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 I 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 Buckminster Fuller you go anywhere from not all these are
Artists you have BF Skinner the psychologist Charles bullfinch the architect Kirt gouty the sports cter um then you do have RS like wisel Homer but there’s a lot of famous people painted uh buried there and I would be remiss 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 uh
Gondola days is a book that came out about 10 or so years ago 20 years so years go 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 it
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 overview 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 isab Bella 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 or 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 was the kind of um standard biography until some of the more recent ones come out but it’s this 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 PO surprise for fiction which she did in 1921 for the Age of Innocence um she didn’t actually publish her 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 taled 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 mounter 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 also 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 Lennox Massachusetts the mount was conceived by the riter from the ground up she dreamed its location guided its aesthetic
Principles and designed 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 staged 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 2third of her collection has been returned to the Mount what does 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 WR 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 residence 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 mansion
In the area I don’t think I don’t know maybe only a handf still exist but in his Heyday in late 1800s and early 1900s there were a lot of mansions in Lennox so it wasn’t you know just some sort of random place that she she chose she did
Build she does build it in 198 buil it 198 1902 and only lived there till 1911 where she moved to France and after World War I she only 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 in a second it’s actually
Very key to what uh she ends up doing and as soon as you walk in this is the entrance actually the back of the house um but you come in this way and as you come in the door there was 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 Luxemburg Gardens uh the way that the trees are sculpted and this is an archway that 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 ALB 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 Lennox but this was their
Performance space for about 20 years and then it became a separate Excuse Me Foundation in 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 restored
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 uh 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 as reference it at the end that you know talks about the
Principles that were put with this and they’re still being uh adhered 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 port 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 don’t 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
Hall always 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 C or 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 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 a 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 Warton
Who is from the family of the Wharton School of Business at upen um he had a lot of mental issues and their marriage kind of fell apart and she ended up going to the 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 Isabella 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 in like five
Languages you know reading science so she’s a legitimate intellectual Isabelle 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 Garder 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 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 is
Actually from her bedroom with an old telephone looking out over the landscape uh 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 that uses this called the classical principles of modern design lessons from edth Warton and a c 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 York
Society but she did write books that are based on the birk shearers and two of the more famous ones their novelas is Ethan FR 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 Pol surprise with in 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 has 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 questions the Codman house uh and Lincoln match related I don’t know if that is related 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
Maine 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 doctor from Bowden so we have Edith getting it from Yale
And Sarah Arjun 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 Maine and on the coast of York Maine 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 quaint little town and this is her house it was built in 1774 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 as far as ostentation goes but he 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 VI of colors from something
That’s 250 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 siger 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 carved into the window in her bedroom with a diamond and like I mentioned she had rheumatoid uh 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 n 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 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 birs 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 main 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 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 the pointed fur 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 in 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 spent 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 f 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 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 cilia faxer um but she has a house uh 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 Isabelle Stewart carder involveed she does have certainly dinners at her
House in Annie fields and her husband our guests um Celia thxer who we’ll get to in a second the poet and author off of appledore she is there you have the author will Cather um a lot of Henry James once again pops up rard Kipling Harry pet Stow know Mark Twain just a
Lot there just amazing amount of folks from the 1800s the 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 thax and she was born 1835 and passes away in
1894 and she is a daughter of a Lighthouse Keeper um name is Thomas Leighton and he was a Lighthouse Keeper at uh White Island if you’re familiar we get to these in a second of the Isles of schs but the lighthouse out the a of sches 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 some political office didn’t win but he ended up getting an appointed as
Lighthouse Keeper so cyia fxra 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 tough 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 island of shows which is appledore and he opens up a hotel called the appledore hotel which is fairly 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 ader 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 um
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 Danny fields we see Nathaniel hawthor we see John Green Leaf Whittier the poet andry wsw withth Longfellow the actor
Edward Thomas booth and the painter who will end our program with child Hassam so appledore is interesting in the fact the Isles of shs are the set of I think it’s like nine or so islands off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire and the state line actually divides these
Islands so the ones the north are in Maine the one to the South are in New Hampshire so appledor which is the largest go over here um that is in Maine the one today that you can visit most readily 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’ll 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 was we’ll see a video on appledore but appledore is a little more you can get uh in the summer you can get daily boat to go out to is to the Star Island U but appor itself um
Doesn’t have a hotel anymore the hotel the hotel Burns early 1900s I believe um so to actually see 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 area end it 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 are lovely nightly resource of uh all things not not always New England but uh a lot of it’s focused on New England and this is the story kind of Celia faxer and what’s going on to appor
Today they float on the horizon just within sight of land nine Islands 8 Miles off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine the aisles of Shs 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’re Jennifer cie executive director of The schs Marine laboratory a field station on appledore run jointly by the
University of New Hampshire and Cornell University and because they they are isolated on the island they haven’t mixed with the other introduced apple trees on the mainland summer students here earn a semester’s credit in just two 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 lighthous
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 faxer 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 a 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 charm on artists today appledore in particular has been a
Destination for artists for over 100 years and I think that’s you know the same reasons artists come out here now as 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 tradeoff 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 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 appor we have to spend an afternoon in appor and so this is Celia fax’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 the fact that in kit
On the mainland which if you go south of the outlets on Route One in kit 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 kid my 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 a 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 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 her 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 Isles of scholes in an island garden now a memorable murder is what I alluded to at the
Beginning there was a a very Infamous murder that takes place on Smuttynose in 1871 or 72 and smudy noose is basically adjacent to appledore 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 this 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 it is considered one of the first examples of True Crime so it’s a you know 80-year predecessor to Truman podes 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 eyewitnesses directly
And everything else but she writes this true crime um considered one of the best Pros things and 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 was born in Boston in 1859 and dies in 1935 one of his famous paintings here is the Boston Comon at Twilight and he did spend a lot of time on appdore 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 you can imagine we have this you know huge wind storm 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 and it was about 15 years ago and 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 lyan 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 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 came 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 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 harot 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 rest bit in the shade but um there’s just still a a memorial a remembrance of child hosome um and I’m sure that most people would not be aware that there’s actually a child hosome Park in the city of Boston so um CH Hassam himself you know we’ve
Kind of come across some of these things of salons and various interactions among a lot of the illuminate of this particular era and one thing that child Hassam 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 La 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 shephered that along and there were our colonies in you know Provincetown there were our colonies up in a gunit um you know there are colonies all over the place in um in New England and child Hassam shows up at
A lot of them so if you want to end up doing kind of another connections you can find out that child Hassam in art colonies is one that certainly comes up in awful lot and there are a few books on him not as many as 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 a 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 hosome so um and once again you know most major museums the MFA you know the met in New York um child hos is certainly in the collection and usually on display so we’ll wrap it up with kind of
A summary here and you know I was originally 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
A 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
Singer being a Portrait Painter obviously you know people had to have means in 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 all 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 this 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 Sergeants 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 in over 2,000 waterolor painting so there’s no short of John singor Sergeant work uh if you’re familiar with the Boston area he did do Miracles 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 Magnus and photography I do have a website Bruce mags. smugmug.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 on the 17th at 7 pm 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 it’s a a fascinating place and a place I couldn’t get my head around until 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 more
Than 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 somebody asked about the Sphinx at the um why has Sphinx honor Civil War dead at the um 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 Orbin 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 some said they were missing my voice from time time let’s do bad oh somebody from Charles South Carolina there’s a child Hassam painting down there Lizzie bordon 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