Americans Abroad: 19th Century Travelers in Italy Exhibit

“In the 19^th century Italy was the most desirable destination for travelers from every corner of  Europe and beyond.  Thousands crossed mountains, even oceans, to go there, leaving their ‘barbarous’ homelands to study and admire Italy’s unsurpassed aesthetic and cultural riches.”

 - Crawford Alexander Mann III, Curator, Museum of Art RISD

     American visitors to Italy in the 19^th century wrote travel narratives, collected souvenirs, and some even became expatriates, never to cross the Atlantic again.  This exhibition highlights books, prints, sculpture and photographs from the collections at the Athenaeum that were inspired by visits to Italy in the 19^th century.  Several of the objects on display were purchased by Athenaeum members and sent back to the library to be displayed in the public halls so that all could experience and enjoy the treasures of Italy.

Image: Marble copy of Column of Phocas, Roman Forum. Presented by Rev. Dr. Alexis Caswell, 1861. Athenaeum Member 1836-1877 & President of Brown University, 1868-72.

“Every visitor in Rome makes it almost his first business to hasten to the Forum, to see them in their grandeur and their desolation.  When I was here during the last winter, as I gazed again and again upon them, it occurred to me that I could not render a better service to the Providence Athenaeum, than by placing accurate copies of these much admired remains of ancient art in its halls.  I hoped, also, that they would interest and gratify the public, and would be especially welcomed by the lovers of art; and minister, in some degree, to the growth of a correct architectural taste among us.”

– Rev. Dr. Alexis Caswell (1799-1877)

Image: Aurora, large framed photograph of fresco painting in the Palazza Rospigliosi, Rome by Guido Reni, 1613-14.  Donated by Mrs. George (Anna) Richmond in 1867. 

     Guido Reni’s Aurora fresco on the ceiling of the Casino at the Palazza Rospigliosi was a popular attraction for 19^th century tourists in Italy, and has become one of the most famous and frequently copied works in the history of art.  Perhaps inspired by her visit to Rome, Anna Richmond also donated funds for the design and construction of the drinking fountain at the Athenaeum.  In 1873, it was one of 30 proposed public drinking fountains approved by the City Water Commission to be supplied with Pawtucket water.  The inscription on the fountain reads “Come Hither Every One That Thirsteth.”  George Richmond was an original member of the Athenaeum in 1836 and lived with his wife Anna at 42 College Street across the road from the Athenaeum.

 

 Madonna & Child, by Raphael. Engraving. The Renaissance of Art in Italy:  An Illustrated History by Leader Scott (Scribner & Welford, 1883)
Purchased through the Carrington Hoppin Fund.

Carrington Hoppin (1812-1879) was born into a prominent Rhode Island family who could trace their lineage back to the colonial period.  His father, Benjamin Hoppin was an original subscriber to the Providence Athenaeum in 1831 and donated funds to the new building in 1838, while his brother William Warner Hoppin was Governor of Rhode Island from 1854-56.  Mr. Hoppin graduated Brown University in 1834, was an extensive traveler in many lands and died suddenly of heart-disease at Zurich, Switzerland in 1879.  The Carrington Hoppin fund at the Athenaeum was established by his brothers at his bequest and “devoted to the purchase of books, engravings, or photographs relating to Italy and Italian art.”

Image: Rio di Santa Maria Formosa, Venice, by John Singer Sargent.  Watercolor. Coutesy of the RISD Museum of Art.

Thanks to guest blogger, Kate Wodehouse, Collections Librarian for writing about her exhibit Americans Abroad : 19th Century Travelers in Italy. The exhibit will be on display in the Philbrick Rare Book Room May 15th to August 24th 2012.

The Athenaeum’s exhibit was conceived in conjunction with the current exhibition, Pilgrims of Beauty:  Art and Inspiration in 19^th-Century Italy at the Museum of Art RISD, on view through Sunday, July 8th 2012. Crawford Alexander Mann III, Curator.

 

 

Gazing at Lilies: Oscar Wilde’s American Lecture Tour Exhibit

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered, I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Did you know that Oscar Wilde made star appearances in Providence, Pawtucket, Newport and North Attleboro?  In 1882 he traveled across America dressed in knee breeches, velvet jacket, floppy ties and a “wide-awake” hat as he lectured on good taste and the mores of the Aesthetic Movement.  He was widely ridiculed as the icon of the Aesthetes in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride and was a popular target for journalists and cartoonists.  Wilde was invited to lecture across America as a real-life Bunthorne to promote the opera to American audiences.

Bunthorne courtesy of The Operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan (Philadelphia, 1894)

Prior to his American tour at 27 years old. Wilde had only published one “thin” volume of poetry and written a play, Vera, or the Nihilists that he was unable to get produced.  He gained fame as the icon of the Aesthetic Movement in London through cartoons such as the Six-Mark Teapot by George du Maurier. (pictured below from Punch, Oct. 30th 1880)  This cartoon is based on Wilde’s famous remark while still a student at Oxford that “he found it harder and harder every day to live up to his blue china.”  It wasn’t until 1892 that Wilde attained success as a playwright with Lady Windermere’s Fan.

Aesthetic Bridegroom: It is quite consummate, is it not? Intense Bride: It is indeed! Oh Algernon, let us live up to it!

In America, Wilde kept up a grueling speaking schedule lecturing in a new town every few days as he criss-crossed the country, for a total of 150 stops in the course of a year.  He lectured to small crowds in towns such as Leadville, Colorado and Omaha, Nebraska and in front of 2,000 people in cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago.  In Providence, Wilde stayed at the Narragansett Hotel, and lectured in a maroon velvet suit and black stockings on the “Decorative Arts” to a small crowd at Low’s Grand Opera House.  A few days later, on September 28th, he spoke in Pawtucket and the local newspaper reported “Oscar Wilde, a soft young Englishman with shrewdness enough to profit by the American weakness for paying to be humbugged, spoke to a small audience in Music Hall, Friday evening last.” (Pawtucket Gazette & Chronicle, Oct. 6, 1882)

The exhibition Gazing at Lilies celebrates Wilde’s American tour with a selection of books, manuscripts, photographs and decorative art objects.  We are grateful to our colleagues at the following institutions for their generous loans to the exhibit: Elizabeth J. Johnson Pawtucket History Research Center, John Hay Library at Brown University, Newport Historical Society and the Rhode Island Historical Society. The exhibition is on view through April 30th, 2012.

Raven-ous thanks our guest blogger, Kate Wodehouse, Collections Librarian

 

Pre-Civil War Photo of the Coliseum in Rome

The Providence Athenaeum recently rediscovered a five-foot wide, panoramic photograph of the Coliseum in Rome that was taken 150 years ago by one of the most famous Italian architectural photographer of the day, Tommaso Cuccioni, and given to the Athenaeum in 1860 by member Albert Jenkins Jones. Cuccioni was especially noted for his exceptional large-format photographs, like the one the Athenaeum owns, and exhibited them at an early and important 1859 exhibition of art photography in Paris, held alongside the official Salon.

Albert Jones’ gift to the Providence Athenaeum of Cuccioni’s Coliseum photograph should be recognized as a significant and early act of public patronage of the arts during those fervent years after the founding of the Rhode Island Art Association (RIAA) in 1853. Jones had been a founding member of the RIAA, but left for Italy in 1854 to become an art critic and European correspondent for the Providence Journal and New York Times. Jones’ likely bought the Coliseum photograph directly from Cuccioni’s studio in Rome, and one can only imagine the conversations that might have taken place between Jones, the architectural photographer, and Jones’ companion in Italy that year, the brilliant young Rhode Island architect Thomas Tefft (died December 1859) – whose final design proposal for downtown Providence architecture had been a dramatic free-standing coliseum-shaped office building planned to stand in front of the Arcade, on the site of so-called Turk’s Head Building.

Thanks to today’s guest blogger, historian Nancy Austin.  She will curate an exhibit of the photo this September.