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The Gilbert Stuart Birthplace: A House Museum With a Different Spin

The early American painter Gilbert Stuart had many faults. He lived well beyond his means, was hopelessly unreliable and had a lifelong addiction to snuff.

Perhaps he can be forgiven for the snuff addiction. After all, he was born in a snuff mill in Saunderstown, Rhode Island.

Stuart’s father, Gilbert Stewart, built the snuff mill, one of the first in America, after immigrating from Scotland. He ran the family business in the basement of their home.

Gilbert Stuart Birthplace, an artist home and snuff mill.

Today, the restored Gilbert Stuart Birthplace & Museum will take you back to colonial life in 1760. It will also take you back to snuff-making and corn grinding, as the museum has two mills on the property.

Gilbert Stuart

He was born in Saunderstown on Dec. 3, 1755 and baptized in the Old Narragansett Church. His mother, Elizabeth Anthony Stewart, belonged to a prominent Middletown, R.I., family that owned huge tracts of land.

When Gilbert was six, the family moved to Newport, R.I., where his father ran a shop that advertised “Continues to Make and Sell, Superfine Flour of Mustard.”

Detail from Gilbert Stuart self portrait, Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, R.I.

He showed an early talent for drawing, and a visiting Scottish painter, Cosmo Alexander, tutored him. At 14 he painted Dr. Hunter’s Spaniels, a copy of which hangs at the birthplace. At 16 he moved to Scotland with Alexander to pursue his studies, but Alexander died and Stuart couldn’t make a living. So he returned to Newport as a crew member on a collier headed for Nova Scotia.

He and his family sided with the Loyalists during the American Revolution. So in 1775 his father fled to Nova Scotia and he moved to England. There, Benjamin West took him into his home as his apprentice.

Success

Stuart went on to paint more than 1,000 portraits. He first established himself in London, where he adopted the style of an English gentleman. His paintings commanded some of the highest prices in England. Remarkably, he painted without sketching his subject first. His philosophy was to load his pictures with color, but keep the colors separate. “No blending, tis destruction to clear & bea[u]tiful effect,” he told his pupils.

He was impetuous, moody and a brilliant conversationalist. Even the irascible John Adams enjoyed sitting for him.

In 1786, at 30, he married an exceedingly pretty 17-year-old, Charlotte Coates. They would eventually have 12 children, but seven died while still young.

They lived well beyond their means, and he and Charlotte had to move to Dublin to avoid debtors’ prison.

Stuart returned to the United States in 1793, hoping to paint a portrait of George Washington. He figured it would establish his reputation in the new republic.

He was right.

Gilbert Stuart, Back in the USA

Gilbert Stuart painted two portraits of Washington from one sitting in Philadelphia.

The first, known as the Lansdowne portrait, was a full-length portrait intended for William Petty, Lord Lansdowne. Stuart concentrated on Washington’s face and finished the rest of it later.

abigail-adams-attacked-thomas-jefferson-washington

George Washington,
Landsdowne Portrait, Brooklyn Museum of Art

He made several copies of the painting, one of which hangs in the East Room of the White House. That was the painting of Washington that First Lady Dolley Madison rescued when British soldiers advanced on the capital during the War of 1812. Other accounts have the doorman and the gardener removing the portrait.

The second painting, perhaps the most famous in America, was intended for Mount Vernon, along with a companion portrait of Martha Washington. Stuart asked if he could hang on to the unfinished painting so he could make copies of it. Then, he said, he’d deliver them both to Mount Vernon.

The Hundred Dollar Bill Painting

They never got it.

Stuart called it his hundred-dollar bill painting. Every time he needed money, he’d dash off a copy of the painting and sell it to a ready buyer.

The Athenaeum, by Gilbert Stuart

The painting has been copied millions of times, most notably as an engraving on the one dollar bill and on a number of versions of postage stamps. John Swords, a ship captain in the China trade, took a copy of it to Canton, where Chinese artists made at least a hundred copies on glass. Stuart sued him and in 1802 a judge ordered Swords to cease and desist.

Once Stuart painted Washington, he had no shortage of commissions. He painted the next five U.S. presidents, Horatio Gates, Aaron Burr, John Jacob Astor, King George III, John Jay and John Singleton Copley.

Abigail Adams wasn’t sure she’d ever get the portrait Stuart painted of her. It took him 15 years to finish, and by the time it arrived she remarked that it looked no more like her than anyone else.

The Gilbert Stuart Birthplace and Museum

The museum includes period furniture and artifacts as they would have been used in each room. None of the artifacts are original to the house, but the handbuilt foundation and the enormous ballast brick fireplace in the kitchen certainly are.

Five Things You’ll Remember from The Gilbert Stuart Birthplace

Original Paintings

While the original Washington portraits do not hang from the walls of the Stuart birthplace, some original works do. And there are copies of the Washington portraits. The museum also recently added an art gallery with changing exhibits.

Beautful Grounds

Rhode Islanders call the museum a hidden gem because it’s on a country road a mile-and-a-half from the highway. Which makes it a pleasant place to visit on a nice day. In addition to the house and the mills, the birthplace encompasses a pond, a stream with a fish ladder, a colonial herb garden and hiking trails. You can picnic on the well-kept grounds or rent a boat and row on the pond. Or pack a lunch; the museum grounds have picnic tables.

The Snuff Mill

Not many houses have a kitchen that shares space with a water wheel. But right off the basement kitchen is the wooden water wheel and all the gears that moved the stone that crushed tobacco into snuff.

Fish Ladder

In the spring, the herring run between Carr Pond and the Narragansett Bay. Try to time your visit to watch the silvery fish surge up the mill stream to spawn in the freshwater pond.

Colonial Artifacts

The furniture includes the classic colonial multi-use table-that-turns-into-a-bench. There’s a spinning wheel and a loom, old rope beds and pewter dishes.

If you visit…

You can’t go on a self-guided tour, but tours are on the hour and led by a knowledgeable docent. There is a gift shop.

It’s an old building with very uneven floors, not accessible for wheelchairs . Parking is easy, though, in the lot across from the museum.

The Gilbert Stuart Birthplace is open from mid-April thru September.

Plan to eat in historic Wickford nearby. The village has one of the largest collections of 18th century dwellings anywhere in the Northeast. Most still stand on their original foundations. The Wickford Art Association sponsors a huge art festival every July.

Website: https://gilbertstuartmuseum.org/

Images: Gilbert Stuart birthplace (featured image) By Mlanni98 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77139356.

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Edward Gorey House: A Quirky Cape Cod Museum

The Edward Gorey House may not be what you think about when you think “Cape Cod house museum.”

On the other hand, the Cape’s appeal to free thinkers and quirky artists might mean the Edward Gorey House is exactly what you expect from a Cape Cod house museum.

You’ll definitely find free thinking and quirky at 8 Strawberry Lane in Yarmouth Port. Two signs posted at the entrance give you an idea of what to expect. One says, “Please, no mayonnaise.” The other says, “Please, No Henry James.” Gorey hated the 19^th century author, but reread his books to remind himself how much he hated him.

Gorey in his kitchen, 1999. He must have tidied.

The Edward Gorey House

You have probably seen Edward Gorey’s art — detailed ink drawings of Victorian and Edwardian characters in absurd or macabre settings. His books have titles like The Glorious Nosebleed, The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Always One Button Short.

He wrote and illustrated more than 100 of them. He also designed theatrical costumes, book covers and playbills, wrote plays and created the animated introduction to PBS’s Masterpiece Theater’s Mystery!

Gorey especially loved Agatha Christie mysteries

In 1978, Gorey won Tony Awards for his costume and set designs for the Broadway play, Dracula. With his royalties from the play he bought a 200-year-old sea captain’s cottage on the Yarmouth Port Common. Gorey remodeled the house, leaving the wide pine floorboards and enlarging the rooms. He had cabinets built for his many, many collections.

On weekends he would fold his six-foot frame into a yellow Volkswagen Bug and drove it to yard sales, antique shops and used bookstores. Undoubtedly he visited Parnassus just down the street. He then brought his found treasures home, where he put them in his wunderkammers – cabinets of wonder. You could say without fear of contradiction that Edward Gorey had hoarding tendencies.

The Clutter

He found inspiration for his surrealistic and witty drawings in cheese graters, Japanese cinema, French surrealism, insects, old children’s books, frogs and decorative rocks – to name a few. The curators have cleared out some of the clutter in the house and organized it.

In Gorey’s large TV room at the back of the house you can watch the Mystery! Trailer on a large-screen television. The TV probably didn’t exist during his lifetime (1925-2000). He almost certainly would have bought a big one had he lived longer, as he loved television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frasier, The Golden Girls and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Along with a sample of his collections, the five-room museum brims with his work in the form of drawings, sketchbooks and 3-D manifestations, like the five-foot-tall stuffed creature standing at the kitchen sink.

You won’t see the second floor, but you will see his downstairs bathroom (there’s a skeleton in the shower). The Gorey House has no velvet ropes, no rooms blocked with Plexiglas. You’re free to wander. And you can leaf through his sketchbooks for Mystery!, stroke his fur coats, touch his typewriter. You’ll only see a tiny portion of the 26,000 books he collected, though.

Exhibits change every year, and the house is open to visitors from early April through December (check the website for hours). Gorey loved animals (especially cats) and insects, and the Edward Gorey House has a mission raising awareness of animal welfare.

And yes, it has a gift shop.

Getting To the Edward Gorey House

One of the best things about the Gorey House is getting there. It stands just off the King’s Highway – also known as Route 6A.

Old Kings Highway in Barnstable Village

The highway runs east-west along the northern part of Cape Cod. Originally a Wampanoag path, it evolved into a colonial cart path and now a scenic byway. It comprises the largest contiguous historic district in the United States. You’ll see stone walls, salt marshes, sea captain’s houses, antique shops, cemeteries, tidal flats, general stores, cranberry bogs and restaurants. It runs from Bourne to Orleans, but the prettiest section stretches from East Sandwich through Barnstable and Yarmouth Port.

Gorey’s favorite restaurant, Jack’s Outback, is still in operation nearby, though it’s located in a different building than it was during his lifetime. You can find it at 161 Main Street.

Five Things You’ll Remember From Your Visit

Snapshots

Throughout the house, framed snapshots of Edward Gorey give a sense of the man. They show him at garden parties, on the beach and asleep on his sofa surrounded by cats.

Gorey signing an autograph at Jack’s Outback

Fur Coats

Gorey stood over six feet tall and wore full length fur coats, along with sneakers, jeans, heavy jewelry and a Harvard scarf. The museum displays a collection of his fur coats on a rack.

Edward Gorey had quite a look going.

Stuffed Creature at Sink

As you might expect from Edward Gorey, a hodgepodge of random objects fills the kitchen, covers the counters and line the fireplace mantle. A five-foot-tall stuffed penguin-like bird – the fruit of Gorey’s imagination – stands at the sink. Gorey’s mismatched china fills the dish drainer on the kitchen counter.

A Gorey creation

The Framed Waffle

Among the many framed items on the wall is a waffle. Is it a real waffle or fake? Somehow in the Gorey house it doesn’t matter.

The collections

Gorey stuffed the house with his collections. The curators have thinned them out, so what you see are countless ceramic frogs and rocks. He apparently inherited the collecting bug from his mother, who saved his childhood ephemera – on display in a Wunderkammer.

Images: Mannequin dressed in Gorey clothes By EgorovaSvetlana – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135673887. Route 6A By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15491118/

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Fitz Henry Lane, The Gloucester Town Painter Who Made a Huge Comeback

Fitz Henry Lane was a disabled sailmaker’s son from Gloucester, Mass., who painted signs and fire screens and seascapes on canvas. Those paintings sold for $100 apiece, $500 at most.

Fishing Party by Fitz Henry Lane

Frederic Church, two decades younger, was one of the most celebrated artists of his day. He painted monumental scenes of nature, wild, rugged, uninhabited landscapes. His paintings sold for $5,000 and as much as $10,000.

Twilight in the Wilderness, by Frederic Church

Lane and Church both painted coastal Maine, accessible to mid-19^th century landscape artists. They came to Mount Desert Island to capture the grandeur of nature on canvas for their wealthy patrons.

Church painted the Maine his patrons wanted to see— an untamed wilderness, according to. Margaret Markle Lovell, author of Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America. So did the other painters in Church’s milieu – the Hudson River School of Art.

The image of raw, uninhabited nature “was a powerful fiction in the making and selling of pictures,” said Lovell, in a talk sponsored by the Farnsworth Art Museum in September 2023

Lane, however, went in a different direction. He saw plenty of people along the coast and plenty of commercial activity. As a Gloucester native, he knew thousands of men made their living clearcutting that untamed landscape and fishing that empty marinescape. Hundreds of humble schooners made as many as 17 trips a year hauling lumber, hay and granite. Hundreds more made several trips a year to fish for cod in the Grand and Georges Banks.

Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1863

So it’s no surprise that Lane’s painting of Mount Desert Island includes a coasting schooner hauling lumber from the Maine woods.

These days Fitz Henry Lane’s paintings sell for more than Church’s. His Manchester Harbor (with boats and people) sold for $5.5 million in 2004. (See it here.) Church’s record currently stands at $3.2 million for Twilight in the Wilderness, sold in 2011.

Here are seven more fun facts about Fitz Henry Lane.

1. For the longest time no one figured out his name was Fitz Henry Lane.

He was born Nathaniel Rogers Lane in 1804, but in 1831 had his name legally changed. According to the National Gallery of Art, his middle name began to appear as “Hugh,” and he was widely known as Fitz Hugh Lane. Then archival research in 2004-2005 made it clear his name was Fitz Henry Lane. Why he changed it remains a mystery.

Fitz Henry Lane

2. Many of the Gloucester scenes he painted can be experienced today.

The artist’s house in Gloucester

Lane didn’t have an international reputation, like Church. Instead, he had local fame. Many Cape Ann residents commissioned his works and passed them down through the generations. Local families then donated the paintings to the Cape Ann Museum along with furnishings. As the Museum points out, “much of Gloucester’s historic waterfront and many of the natural vistas and landmarks that Lane painted have been preserved and can be re-experienced today.” His stone house still overlooks the harbor.

Braces Rock in Gloucester

3. Fitz Henry Lane paintings aren’t just pretty landscapes.

Castine from Fort George

They’re a record of maritime commerce in the northeast during the mid-19^th century. Lane knew what ships carried, where they came from and where they were headed. And he understood where people fit into the coastal economy.

Lovell, for example, pointed out that his painting Castine From Fort George depicts the Maine town as a place of serene prosperity. It was, in fact, the richest town in Maine at the time. In the foreground, men cut hay, which would feed the oxen that hauled logs from the lumber camps. Lane also included three women, two Euro-Americans buying a basket from a Penobscot. The native American baskets were much prized and used. Lane would have known how the Penobscots fit into the local economy from his experience with them in Gloucester and on his visits to Castine, Lovell said.

Maritime historians find his work helpful in their research, according to Erik Ronnberg, Jr., maritime curator at the Cape Ann Museum.

4. Many of his patrons made their money through shipping.

Winged Arrow and Southern Cross, clipper ships used in the China and California trade

People who’d acquired great wealth through maritime trade wanted to see ships and warehouses, not empty landscapes. Robert Bennet Forbes, for example, got rich as a sea captain in the China trade. He commissioned Lane to paint the frontispiece for a book he wrote. In it, Forbes had described a 17-day voyage he took to Ireland on a ship carrying food to famine victims.

Sidney Mason, a Gloucester native who made it rich in shipping, bought several Lane paintings. Mason has earned credit for modernizing Puerto Rico, and he commissioned Lane to paint a series of seascapes from his career, including Gloucester, San Juan and New York.

Charlotte Cushman proved the exception. She was not a shipping merchant but a cross-dressing actress quite famous in her day. She bought two Fitz Henry Lane paintings. But then she did take them on a ship to Europe, according to a local newspaper.

5. Fitz Henry Lane once painted himself as a ragged schooner.

Salem Harbor. Lane’s schooner is to the left of the clipper ship.

In his painting Salem Harbor he depicts a magnificent clipper ship with every snow-white sail unfurled. Nearby floats a small schooner, a humble schooner like the thousands that hauled lumber and granite from Canada and Maine to Boston and New York. His brownish, discolored sails bear his initials in red. One wonders: Does the clipper ship represent Frederic Church?

6. Eating a poisonous weed caused his lameness.

A Gloucester minister (and a female one at that) named Ada C. Bowles published her memories of Fitz Henry Lane. In it, she wrote, “As understood, his disablement was the result of eating, as a boy, of the poisonous weed, ‘Apple-of-Peru,’ so called in my childhood, and always associated with the tragedy of the artist’s life. …[It] is well known now as Thorn-apple (Datura Stramonium) from which children are still warned, in the name of the mischief which it brought upon Gloucester’s most famous artist.”

Or maybe he contracted polio.

Becalmed off Halfway Rock

Bowles, who took lessons from Lane, credits his “crippled condition” for his devotion to his art. Perhaps she had a point. Historians view his paintings as astonishingly detailed and accurate. He knew all kinds of vessels, their size and shape, the length of their masts and their complex rigging systems.

7. He was rediscovered by a colorful opera singer who married a rich, much older woman.

Owl’s Head, acquired by Maxim Karolik

After Lane died, the French Impressionists eclipsed him in popularity. Collectors and critics forgot all about him, until Maxim Karolik came along. Karolk, a Russian-Jewish opera singer, married a wealthy Brahmin, Caroline Codman, twice his age. The couple then went into an art collecting frenzy. They specialized in American art, which they donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After Caroline died in 1948, Maxim continued to collect. He donated more than a dozen Fitz Henry Lane paintings to the museum.

Image: Fitz Henry Lane House By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9587588

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How Artist Fidelia Bridges Became a Household Name

One of the most successful female painters in 19^th century America, Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) was called a “true daughter of New England.”[1] Born to a ship’s captain and his wife in Salem, Mass., she later established her residence in Connecticut. There she sat for hours in the woods or along the marshes, observing finches, bluebirds and sandpipers.

Fidelia Bridges, by Oliver Ingraham Lay

She worked in pencil and watercolor to capture each species in combination with local plants and encouraged viewers of her pictures to become more sensitive to the cycles of nature.

Flower painting had long been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of young girls and amateurs, but Bridges changed all that. Her works sold at professional venues faster than she could paint them. Her close study of nature allowed her to create pictures so realistic that critics claimed that they exuded the fragrance of field blossoms and glowed with the plumage of birds.

A feminist in spirit, she always insisted that women had the right to shape independent careers on their own terms.

Artist Fidelia Bridges

Born into the age of the horse and buggy, she lived to ride about in automobiles and see women get the right to vote. Since 2023 is the centenary of the death of this remarkable artist, this is an appropriate moment to reflect upon her achievements.[2]

From the age of 16 when she lost their parents and the family home, Fidelia Bridges and her siblings were forced to fend for themselves. While their brother headed off to sea, the young women pursued the few occupations open to them in the 1850s: teaching school and working as a governess.

Recognizing Fidelia’s precocious artistic talent, her sisters helped her obtain training in Salem and later in Philadelphia. Soon she was exhibiting oil paintings at the prestigious venues in New York City like the National Academy of Design. Realizing that watercolor was her true medium, she created small works on paper that dazzled writers like Henry James and Mark Twain, who purchased them.

As her reputation grew, one journalist pondered whether her pictures “will continue [to be] popular with buyers until one or two might fall in[to] the hands of Prang or some other chromo publisher, when reproduced in a cheap form they will become… a drug on the market.”

Louis Prang

He was referring to Louis Prang, the Boston-based publisher who had perfected a process for accurate color reproductions of works of art that could be sold cheaply and in large numbers. “Miss Bridges’ work,” the journalist continued, “owing to its peculiar tones, would chromo admirably, but we trust that no such misfortune will overtake it.”[3]

Unbeknown to him, Prang had already recognized the potential of her work to “chromo.” (Like “Google” in our day, the use of chromolithography became so common that it was shortened to a verb). Prang worked with the leading male artists of the day including Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. But he realized that the unique palette and subtle chromatic shifts that Bridges achieved in her watercolors would best showcase his printing method.

In 1875 he therefore conceived an elaborate collaborative project entitled Twelve Months. For the project, he commissioned from Fidelia a dozen watercolors of birds in New England landscape settings. They represented the changing conditions of season and weather over the course of a year.

Working at his headquarters in Roxbury, Prang’s lithographers would then reproduce the watercolors and print hundreds of copies of each one, approximately 13 x 10 inches. With his shrewd sense of the post-Civil War art market, Prang understood a single watercolor might sell for $100, but if he sold 500 copies of it at $5 each the profit would be much greater.

A Year in New England

Bridges’ pictures came to be prized by middle-class housewives all over the United States. They could never afford an original painting, but were happy to own a handsome reproduction.

A close look at the chromolithograph of April demonstrates why her work was so popular. A branch jutting out from the left with pink blossoms just beginning to open provides the perch for two small birds. The artist has perfectly captured the atmosphere of April with her choice of flowers and bird: the song sparrow that heralds the arrival of spring with its singing (note the open mouth of the bird at right). Aware of nature’s multiple micro-habitats, she made a separate study of the ground below with small green plants poking up through the dead leaves. She then inserted those details into the final picture to convey the cycles of growth and decay.

Like April, her renderings of the other eleven months all have their characteristic color schemes, vegetation and avian species. Together, they chronicled the passage of one year’s time in New England.

While Bridges worked on her Twelve Months, Prang debuted another initiative: his first line of Christmas cards. An immediate success, the cards sold for $1.25 each (a considerable amount at the time). They were treasured by families who displayed them on their mantels.

Fidelia Bridges, Household Name

By 1880 Prang was running out of design ideas and decided to hold a competition to generate fresh inspiration. Bridges’ submission won her a position as permanent designer. Over the years she she created some of the most treasured examples. Prang was called “the father of the Christmas card,” but the public looked for cards with the moniker “F. Bridges” to send their holiday greetings.

Until Prang shuttered his chromolithography business in the 1890s, Bridges continued to provide him with watercolors and designs for Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day.

Although the pairing of this proper New England female painter and the brash German-born businessman might have seemed an unlikely duo, their 20-year working relationship gave rise to a stunning portfolio of images by Bridges. Her work enjoyed national circulation as chromolithographs and helped establish her reputation.

Alongside her work for Prang, she found many additional outlets for her creativity. Each year she submitted watercolors and occasionally oil paintings to exhibitions around the country. She was also a leading figure of the American Watercolor Society, where her works sold year after year.

With the emergence of the revolutionary new format of the colorplate book in the 1880s, Bridges found yet another outlet for her distinctive imagery. She made numerous trips across the Atlantic, where she felt a special bond with the English countryside. At her home in Canaan, Conn., she cultivated a magnificent garden that her mentor, William Trost Richards, his daughter, Anna Richards Brewster, and many others took great pleasure in visiting and sketching.

Not surprisingly, she grew increasingly involved in nature conservation, and early on she joined the American Forestry Association.

Two Constants

Working 10 hours a day for much of her life, Bridges completely dedicated herself to what she regarded as an artistic calling. She continued to be flexible and seek new outlets for her images over her 50-year career.

While these endeavors may strike some as disparate, they were grounded in two constants that bound all of her work together. One was her deep knowledge of and reverence for nature that provided a primary theme that ran through her work. The other was her fusion of Eastern and Western art traditions. That predilection belonged to her Salem heritage.

Fidelia Bridges, Daughter of Salem

As the daughter of a ship’s captain, she had access to a world far beyond Massachusetts. Capt. Henry Bridges was a well-respected member of the East India Marine Society, which also included Nathaniel Hawthorne’s father. He participated in the hugely profitable trade that had transformed this modest New England seaport into a global power.

By the time Captain Bridges embarked on his first voyage, the focus of trade shifted to Boston and New York. But the Salem men still plied the waters back and forth to China. They returned with three main staples that Americans increasingly desired—tea, silk and Chinese porcelain. Fidelia Bridges kept those items close for the rest of her days.

Organized in 1799, the East India Marine Society had a threefold purpose: share navigational information related to the East Indies; help families of members who died; and “form a Museum of natural history and artificial curiosities.” The captains took seriously their charge to bring home historic and aesthetic objects, and they developed one of the most influential collecting institutions in antebellum United States. This assemblage meant that Asian art and design were integrated into the life of Fidelia Bridges and would make their mark on her future artistic production.

May

Her chromolithograph May might initially appear to be a modest picture with small birds hovering around flowering branches. But when compared with Utagawa Hiroshige’s Small Bird (Swallow) on a Cherry Branch, a woodblock print created in Japan in 1854, it demonstrates her embrace of the attributes of Asian art to express the vitality of nature.

Japanese artists were not bound by pictorial conventions of symmetry or one-point perspective. Instead, they created asymmetrical compositions. They often cut forms off by the picture’s margin, contributing to the decorative character. Looking again at the picture of April we see the same influence at work, with the form of the tree cut off at the composition’s edge. With the slightly tilted perspective, an eastern sense of space imbues the picture.

Bridges’ work shared with her Asian counterparts an aesthetic simplicity. It was a principle to which she adhered throughout her entire life.

She fused her natural surroundings and avian life of New England with notions of balance and minimalism common to the Far East. Living an outwardly conventional life, Fidelia Bridges was a rebel who created works acquired by collectors and museums nationwide: a testament to her pioneering artistic legacy.

End Notes

[1] Alice Sawtelle Randall, “Connecticut Artists and their Work: Miss Fidelia Bridges in her Studio at Canaan,” The Connecticut Magazine v. 7, n. 5 (February-March 1902): 588.

[2] Katherine Manthorne, Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art (London: Lund Humphries, 2023) provides a full account of the artist’s life and work, and is the source for all information in this article.

[3]Unidentified author, “Fine Arts: Miss Fidelia Bridges,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle July 30, 1874, p. 3.

The author, Katherine Manthorne, is on the art history faculty at the Graduate Center of City University of New York and prior to that she was Director of the Research Center at Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. The winner of numerous fellowships and awards, she recently a new book published Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art (Lund Humphries, 2023). Other recent books exploring 19^th century female artists in two volumes: Women in the Dark: American Female Photographers 1850-1900 (Schiffer Publishing, 2020) and Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (U. of California Press, 2020). She lives in New York City and the Champlain Valley with her husband James Lancel McElhinney and their cat Maeve.

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Socialite Martha Codman Karolik, 70, Takes a Musical Husband, 35. It Goes Well.

Martha Codman in 1928 shocked and titillated East Coast high society when she married an immigrant Jewish opera singer, Maxim Karolik.

She was 70. He was 35.

Moreover, she came from several old, old, wealthy New England families. He didn’t even pretend to. He called himself “Maximum Karolik, but not at minimum prices.”

Martha Codman Karolik in 1906

He once wore a mink-lined overcoat to the exclusive Somerset Club in Boston. His host told him gentlemen don’t wear furs. He replied, “Who ever accused me of being a gentleman? I am a tenor!”

But with his wife and, later, alone, he collected thousands of pieces of paintings, drawings. sculpture, portraits, silver, furniture, prints, engravings, and donated it all to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

And as author Carol Troyen pointed out, Maxim Karolik brought more distinction to the Codman family than the family itself had done in 200 years.

Martha Codman Karolik

Martha Codman was born July 24, 1858, the only surviving child of John Amory Codman and Martha Rogers. Martha’s ancestry included a collection of Brahmin names: Derby, Crowninshield, Pickman, Amory and Codman.

Elias Haskett Derby

Her mother’s great-grandfather, Elias Haskett Derby, was a Salem shipping merchant and one of the richest men in America. Her father, John Amory Codman, was a wealthy artist from the storied Amory and Codman families. He had a mistress, Violet Kimball, who he visited on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for 14 years — at least according to her love letters, which provoked much amusement when read out loud in court.

Proper New England ladies were supposed to keep their names out of the newspaper except at birth, death and marriage. Martha Codman and her mother ignored that rule in a big way.

Squam Lake, New Hampshire, by John Amory Codman, 1848

John Amory Codman died in 1886 and left an estate worth an estimated $400,000. It included a hefty bequest to Mrs. Kimball. The will was challenged by Martha and her mother (“La Femme Terrible,” according to Mrs. Kimball). The case made newspaper headlines for several years. Finally, the ladies settled, giving Violet Kimball $15,000.

Martha’s mother already had wealth of her own, including industrial stocks and large real estate holdings in Boston and Newport. Martha Codman lived with her mother until she was nearly 50. They both had an interest in their family history, and they traveled throughout Europe together collecting family records. Together they kept up an active social life among the elite in Boston, Newport and Washington, D.C.

Martha Codman, On Her Own

La Femme Terrible died in 1905. Martha Codman, then one of the richest women in America, began to build mansions – the Codman-Davis in Washington, D.C., and then Berkeley Villa (now Bellevue) in Newport R.I.

Codman-Davis House in Washington, D.C. (now the Thai Ambassador’s residence)

She hired her cousin, society decorator Ogden Codman, to design both.

In 1927, she invited Maxim Karolik to sing at a gathering in Washington.

Singing Waiter

Maxim Karolik had arrived in the United States five years earlier with few possessions but his charm and his voice. Born in Russia on Nov. 21, 1893, he studied opera at the Petrograd Grand Opera.

He made a living performing at evening entertainments – kind of a “singing waiter,” according to Troyen.

After that concert in Washington, Martha invited him to spend the summer at her Newport house, filled with silver, heirlooms and 20 Siamese cats. She asked him to join her on a trip to Europe. He said yes. Then she asked him to marry her. He said yes to that, too.

They married on the French Riviera. The December-May union of a Brahmin heiress and Russian Jewish émigré horrified her relatives. They insisted she stay in Europe for a year with “the singing bridegroom.”

Maxim Karolik

Martha wrote to her aunt, the one relative who sent her a wedding gift, that Maxim was a gentleman with a wonderful mind, a lovely disposition and a splendid voice.

“Of course, I know what people will say, but I am determined not to pay any attention to that, but get all the happiness and pleasure out of what remains to me of life,” she wrote her aunt.

Collecting

Martha already had an interest in 18^th century art. She had already inherited exquisite early American furniture, silver and paintings, but she needed more to furnish her mansions. She bought other heirlooms from family members with little interest in them.

Maxim encouraged her to collect 18^th century art beyond her family treasures. In 1935, they decided to form the M & M Karolik 18th century American arts collection at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

It debuted on Dec. 2, 1941, five days before Pearl Harbor. The New York Sun reported the crowd “panted and sweated and fainted and exclaimed aloud at the beauty revealed.”

To explain the collection, Karolik penned an Atlantic Monthly essay in 1942, as much about his marriage as about the 18^th century art.

“The concept that all men are born equal was to the men of 1776 no mere phrase…it implied a deep faith in the common man,” he wrote. Back then, wrote Karolik, the artist and the merchant stood on an equal footing with the soldier and the statesman. Karolik – no doubt thinking of himself and Martha – noted that Benjamin Franklin was friends with clockmaker Edward Duffield, George Washington was friends with Boston cabinetmaker Benjamin Frothingham and Thomas Jefferson was friends with Benjamin Randolph, the Philadelphia cabinetmaker who made the desk on which he wrote the Declaration of Independence. They acknowledged an “aristocracy of mind and spirit,” he wrote.

Phase II

The Karoliks then moved on to the 19^th century. Their first collection represented the fine and decorative arts of the urban, colonial elite. The second, more middlebrow collection, included art that didn’t cost a whole lot.

They decided to avoid brand-name painters, and instead to focus on art they liked. “Our motto is, ‘Tell me if the painting is good, and I won’t care who the painter is’,” Maxim liked to say.

Salem Harbor by Fitz Henry Lane

Much 19^th century art had fallen out of favor by collectors. Works by such artists as Eastman Johnson, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole were stored in attics and could be picked up for a song. Martha, getting on in years, let Maxim do much of the legwork.

Sunlight and Shadow: Newbury Marshes by Martin Johnson Heade. National Gallery of Art.

Martha died at 89 on April 21, 1948. Maxim continued to shower the museum with forgotten paintings from the Hudson River school. He also discovered Boston luminists Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry Lane and folk art. In 1951, the M. & M. Karolik collection of American Paintings, 1815-1865 went on exhibit.

Meditation by the Sea, an American folk art oil painting by an unknown artist from the early 1860s. Karolik Collection, MFA.

After Martha Codman Karolik

Karolik loved an audience and spent a great deal of time in the museum. The museum’s director, Perry Rathbone had to keep Maxim’s ego “in a permanently polished condition,” wrote Rathbone’s daughter.

Rathbone made Karolik an honorary curator, which meant he spent every weekday from nine to five in the museum. Wagging his forefinger, he made pronouncements to visitors and remined Rathbone of the collection’s greatness. Rathbone once wrote that Maxim sometimes made him regret his love of American art.

Pictorial quilt: one of the few surviving quilts by Harriet Powers, considered one of the finest examples of Southern pictorial quiltmaking. Karolik collection, MFA>

In 1962, the third and final phase of the M and M Karolik collection went on exhibit, M. & M. Karolik collection of American Water Colors & Drawings including sculpture, 1800-1875.”

Maxim in the News

Time magazine reported on the event – and on Maxim:

[He] divides most of his time these days between his late wife’s summer mansion in Newport and the Ritz in Boston. At the Ritz he usually lunches alone, but every few bites he springs across the room to greet in heavily accented English some acquaintance at another table.

His “batonlike index finger” accompanies an avalanche of talk, “which is usually about Maxim Karolik,” the magazine reported. Both in Boston and Newport,

…he is like a character out of an old Russian novel—a tall, exuberant figure with a penchant for astrakhan-collared coats or pea jackets with mink collars and cuffs. “In Newport,” he says in a typical Karolik maxim, “I am prominent. In Boston, I am important.”

Maxim as an older gentleman

Maxim Karolik died at the age of 70 on Dec. 20, 1963. In the end, he and Martha gave the MFA more than 2,000 high-quality, diverse objects.

Carol Troyen, writing in American Art, summarized the impact of their generosity: “Without the M. and M. Karolik Collections, the holdings in American art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, would compose merely an extremely fine provincial collection.”

With thanks to The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change & a Daughter’s Search for the Truth by Belinda Rathbone. And Fitz Henry Lane and Maxim and Martha Karolik: A Tale of Two Love Stories, a lecture by Carol Troyen.

Images: By AgnosticPreachersKid at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17984196. This story updated in 2024.

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The Recent Rediscovery of John Leslie Breck, Boston Impressionist

John Leslie Breck was a gifted artist on the verge of fame when he took his own life at the age of 39. His sunny Impressionist paintings give no hint of whatever might have caused him to commit suicide.

There are, however, his other pictures: the nocturnes. Those canvases painted by moonlight suggest dark nights of the soul.

Breck brought Impressionism to Boston, but he died before the style took firm hold in America.

His many unsold paintings, which passed through his family, reappeared in several American museums starting in 2021 – for the first time in 120 years.

John Leslie Breck

He was born on a clipper ship in the South Pacific on April 10, 1860, the son of Joseph Berry Breck, a shipmaster in the China trade, and his second wife, Ellen Frances Newell.

John Leslie Breck was still a toddler when the Civil War broke out. His father volunteered for military service and advanced rapidly, ending his service as lieutenant commander. But shortly after the war ended, he came down with tuberculosis and died in San Francisco.

Poppies by John Leslie Breck

The couple had twin daughters who died in infancy and a younger son, Edward, born in San Francisco. Edward became a scholar, a journalist, a spy and a golf champion.

After the death of Joseph Breck, the family moved to Newton, Mass., and John Leslie attended Governor Dummer Academy for a while. In 1878, Ellen Breck brought her two sons to a gymnasium in Leipzig to study. John Leslie went on to study art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

He returned to the United States in 1882. His mother remarried the next year at the age of 43. Her second husband, Frederic William Rice, was a native of Newton, Mass. He was 10 years younger than she and only 10 years older than John Leslie. Frederic, though, died two years after the marriage. She usually accompanied her son on his travels.

Move to Giverny

By 1886 John Leslie Breck was studying at the Academie Julian in Paris. In the spring of 1887, he and some of his fellow students were trying to find someplace new to go in the summer. They decided to try Pont del-Arche and off they went. They had to change trains at Vernon, but from there they spied a lovely little village with white houses and a Norman church — Giverny. They came back the next day.

Farmhouses at Giverny by John Leslie Breck

Four years earlier, Claude Monet had moved to Giverny just as he started to find success as a painter. After a while, the artists who followed him there began to annoy him. He once said,

…When I first came to Giverny I was quite alone, the little village was unspoiled. Now, so many artists, students, flock here, I have often thought of moving away…

He had Breck to blame, for he promoted the village among his fellow American students.

It took just one summer for the nascent art colony to attract notice. That October, a critic for The Art Amateur recognized “quite an American colony has gathered, I am told, at Givernay [sic].” Along with John Leslie Breck, the anonymous critic mentioned Monet, Willard Metcalf and Theodore Robinson.

“ A few pictures just received from these young men show that they have got the blue-green color of Monet’s impressionism and ‘got it bad.'”

More Monet

Unlike the others, Breck stayed the winter in Giverny, and Monet invited him to paint in his garden. Monet said to him,

I won’t give you lessons….we’ll wander about the fields and woods and paint together.

And just as Monet did, he painted a series of haystacks.

Morning Fog and Sun by John Leslie Breck

But then he had a falling out with the great artist because he fell in love with his step-daughter, Blanche Hoschede. Monet forbade the relationship and Breck left Giverny.

By 1889, he was living in Paris with his mother.

Back in the USA

He returned to Boston in 1890, where he was called the head of the Impressionists. He held a one-man show credited with bringing Impressionism to Boston, which gave the old guard a chance to make fun.

Breck and his friend Ross Turner set up a studio in Turner’s home in Salem. A story in the 1890 Boston Transcript suggests the dim view the Boston establishment took of Impressionism. “Ross Turner and John Leslie Breck have returned to this country from foreign parts, and threaten to form a class for out-of-door work in painting at Salem during the month of June,” reported the Transcript.

[W]e may as well be prepared for anything and everything when he lets loose a flock of sweet girl graduates, duly inoculated with the impressionistic visual virus, whose landscapes may blend the charms of amateurishness with those of other kinds of incoherence, “till all is blue.”

In the Valley of the Seine by John Leslie Breck

That same year, he held a one-man show at the prestigious St. Botolph’s Club show. He did it with help from his friend Lilla Cabot Perry, another expatriate who had lived in Giverny and who Monet actually liked.

He returned to France around 1890-91 and painted in England for a while. Then he resettled in the Auburndale village of Newton.

John Leslie Breck in Venice

In 1897, he visited Venice with his mother and his brother, first stopping in Germany to watch his brother compete in a fencing competition. He showed his work in Berlin in 1897, then went to Venice. His time in Venice resulted in more than 25 paintings.

After Venice, little is known about Breck until he took his own life on March 18, 1899. His obituary stated a show of his work was scheduled to open the next day. But Royal W. Leith, in The Magazine Antiques, doubts anyone ever planned such an exhibit.

Giudecca Canal with Fish Baskets, by John Leslie Breck

[A]s Breck appeared to have taken his own life, his friends and family were at pains to dispel rumors of suicide by implying that he was looking forward to a bright future.

Some of those paintings were shown in the two memorial exhibitions after his death, the first at the St. Botolph Club in Boston and the second at the National Arts Club in New York.

Santa Maria Della Salute by Moonlight

A large-scale exhibition of Breck’s work, the first in 120 years, was held at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., in 2021; then the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis from Jan. 22-March 27, 2022; and the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, May 28-Aug. 21, 2022.

Thanks to Anonymous, “Boston Art and Artists,” The Art Amateur, 17, no. 5, October 1887, p. 93, as quoted in R.H. Love, Theodore Earl Butler: Emergence from Monet’s Shadow, Chicago, Illinois, 1985, p. 59. Thanks also to Streets of Salem.

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