etc. Summer 2019

etc.

Summer 2019

The Magazine of The Redwood Library & Athenæum

Spectacular Silver: Yachting’s Goelet Cups Slavery and The Founding of The Redwood Library Per Barclay: Painting with Oil, Sculpting with Water On the Trail with the Music Hunters

W e lc o m e

Contents

Dear Friends,

I write you with much gratitude and excitement about this summer season, for we are once again at the center of so many compelling initiatives, notably the exhibition partnership that is the lead story of this issue, Spectacular Silver: Yachting’s Goelet Cups, organized by the New York Yacht Club in collaboration with the Redwood. Our historic institutions, representing Newport’s eternal affinity for both the sea and culture, are here joined to remind us of the richness of our own history—and of the Redwood’s catalytic role as a municipal archive and expository space in bringing it to life.

Informing today with wisdom drawn from the past is of course a key objective of the Redwood’s promotion of the public humanities, the constellation or arts, letters and sciences that we strive to present in the most accessible ways via our rich program of lectures, concerts and exhibitions. In that sense, we might further appreciate last year’s Volvo Ocean Race through the historical perspectives offered up by this exceptional presentation of a signal chapter in the history of competitive sailing in Newport, America’s sailing mecca.

But there’s lots more! Thus you’ll find at the Redwood this summer a representative variety of events in addition to the Goelet Cups: lectures treating the history of the Newport Folk Festival and that of a Florentine palace, performances by musicians such as the Vox Hunters, and a tri-partite, site-specific installation addressing the essential liquids of oil and water by noted Norwegian contemporary artist Per Barclay.

The point is that our fast-paced digital world demands intellectual flexibility and imagination—an openness to new ideas that we might generate together, exactly through collaborations such as NYYC/Redwood. Indeed, our constituents might be said to share many traits, self-reliance and an intrepid curiosity chief among them. I would therefore conclude with a thank you, and an open invitation to all of our new friends to sign on as members of the Redwood for an ever deeper conjoining of the sporting life and the life of the mind.

Redwood Library & Athenæum Board of Directors 2018-2019

Marvin Abney Holly Bannister, M.D. Daniel Benson Miles O. Bidwell David Brodsky

6 Slavery and The Founding

of The Redwood Library

Sean D. Moore, Ph.D. 9 The Father of American Libraries

Don Dery

1 0 Sporting Sparkling Necklaces

Ketchup, Soy Sauce and Champagne

Anne Ewbank

1 1 Treasures of the Redwood

1 2 Per Barclay: Painting with Oil, Sculpting with Water

Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. 1 5 On the Trail with the

Music Hunters

Armand Aromin Benedict Gagliardi

1 8 At the Athenæum 2 0 Exhibitions at the Redwood

Summer 2019

Editorial Director Benedict Leca, Ph.D.

Founded in 1747 on the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual pursuit and civic engagement, and committed to lifelong, interdisciplinary learning, the Redwood Library & Athenæum generates knowledge in the humanities for the benefit of the widest possible audience with “nothing in view but the good of mankind.”

Virginia Decker Secretary Zia Eftekhar Treasurer

Alice Dickinson

redwoodlibrary.org

Mission Statement

Frank Ray Vice President

etc.

Benedict Leca, Ph.D. Executive Director

R. Daniel Prentiss, Esq. President

2 Spectacular Silver:

Yachting’s Goelet Cups

Vincent Buonanno Grenville Craig Jacalyn Egan Edwin G. Fischer, M.D.* Ronald Lee Fleming Michael K. Gewirz John R. Grace Washington Irving III Dodie Kazanjian Elizabeth Leatherman Earl McMillen III Victoria Mele Allison Walk

Editor Patricia Barry Pettit chartered 1747 Redwood Library & Athenæum 50 Bellevue Avenue Newport, Rhode Island 02840 401.847.0292 redwood@redwoodlibrary.org @redwoodlibrary @theredwoodlibrary

Editorial Advisor Don Dery Design Pam Rogers Design Reprint of any content herein must bear following credit line: Originally Published in Etc., The Magazine of the Redwood Library & Athenæum Summer 2019 Cover: 1884 Goelet Cup for Schooners courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum.

Image: New York Yacht Club

@RedwoodLibrary

*Honorary Board Member

rr ee d dw wo oo od d ll ii b b rr aa rr yy.. o o rr g g 11

2 etc. S u m m er 2019

Goelet Cup for Schooners (detail), 1886, Tiffany & Co.

Spectacular Silver Yachting’s Goelet Cups

by Alice Dickinson A member of New York Yacht Club (NYYC) from 1880 until his death in 1897, New York real estate magnate Ogden Goelet (1851-1897) was among the leading sportsmen of the Gilded Age, whose passion for sailing and affinity for Newport helped the ‘city-by-the-sea’ emerge as a pre-eminent American yachting destination during the second half of the nineteenth century. While not a racer himself, Goelet owned a schooner custom-built at his direction—the 131 ft Norseman—and was an active supporter of the sport. Norseman’s “unusually handsome” [fittings],” as per the New York Times press coverage of its April 1881 launch, presaged his other great commission in yachting luxury: the ‘Goelet Cups,’ the elaborate silver trophies he began to order from such firms as Tiffany & Co. and Whiting Manufacturing Co. in 1882 for NYYC sloop and schooner races held off Newport. The races were to be held when the Club was in Newport on its Annual Cruise, and Goelet offered to bankroll the awards for the two most popular classes of racing: single-masted sloops and the larger two-masted, schooners.

It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for NYYC members to donate trophies for races. James Gordon Bennett Jr. commissioned a group of exceptional awards in the 1870s, and there were regular late nineteenth-century presentations from J. P. Morgan, among others. But in their dazzling craftsmanship, sophisticated design and extravagant cost—$1,000 for the schooner award and $500 for the sloop award—the Goelet Cups are among the finest sailing trophies ever made, and remain stand-out achievements in American silver design forever tied to Goelet’s legacy. Indeed, following his death aboard his yacht Mayflower in Cowes, Isle of Wight, England on August 27, 1897, Goelet’s obituary featured a section devoted to the Goelet Cups, describing them as “the chief prizes contested for annually by the club.” In recognition for his generosity, NYYC commissioned a commemorative scroll honoring his service to the Club and 16year presentation of the Goelet Cup awards.

Goelet Cup for Sloops, 1886, Whiting Manufacturing Co.

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Spectacular Silver The exhibition, currently on view at the Redwood, begins with the first Goelet Cup for Schooners, an enameled silver pitcher and tray, a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Awarded to the yacht Montauk in 1882, it was designed by Charles Osborne for Whiting Manufacturing Co. Establishing the Goelet Cups as exemplars of technical execution and fantastic nautical imagery, the pieces explode with decorative flourishes depicting swirling dolphins and seahorses.

Described as the “most flamboyant trophy Tiffany ever produced,” the 1884 Goelet Cup for Schooners won by Grayling exemplifies the spectacular artistry of some of the top designers employed by Tiffany & Co. at the time: James H. Whitehouse, Charles Osborne, and Eugene J. Soligny. The trophy is shaped as a vessel helmed by the figure of Poseidon on the prow surrounded by six cast dolphins, and features an extravagant treatment of cast and chased detailing such as the intricate graining on the ‘wood’ planks of the hull. The cup is accompanied by its design drawing borrowed from the Tiffany & Co. Archives, which shows the elaborate process through which the designers calibrated the addition of motifs and ornaments to function with the contours of the vase shape.

The 1886 Goelet Cup for Schooners produced by Tiffany & Co. stands out as one of the largest and most sculptural Goelet Cups.

The monumental award features intricately chased decorations that create a dynamic scene showing a mermaid in swirling waves with figures of the winds roiling the water around her. Following the design around the body of the vase the viewer encounters cherublike winds, dolphins swimming in and out of churning waves filled with entangled seaweed, the whole body seeming to swirl down into the base of cast shells. Looking at this elaborate design, it is easy to understand why both this cup and the 1884 Schooner Cup

Goelet Cup for Sloops, 1890, Tiffany & Co.

4 etc. S u m m er 201 9

won by Grayling were exhibited as part of Tiffany& Co.’s awardwinning display at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. More than half of the exhibited prize cups were Goelet Cups that the firm borrowed from their winners, demonstrating the significance of these pieces even years after their making.

The trophies awarded to the sloop class were no less inspired than the larger schooner cups. A prime example is the 1886 sloop cup made by Whiting Manufacturing Co. and awarded to Mayflower, which depicts the myth of Andromeda and the sea serpent. In Greek mythology Andromeda is the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia. Trouble begins when the queen boasts that her daughter is more beautiful than Poseidon’s companions the Nereids. This angers Poseidon, who sends a sea monster to ravage her family’s land. Consulting an oracle, Andromeda’s family chains her to a rock as a sacrifice for the monster. Andromeda is ultimately saved by Perseus, who slays the creature. The trophy depicts Andromeda chained to the rock moments away from attack. The designers recreate the drama of the myth by adding swirling waves and a snaking monster wrapping around the body of the jug and forming the handle.

The 1890 Goelet Cup for Sloops is a Tiffany & Co. wine cooler, the body of which is decorated with seaweed-like ornamentation, and flanked by handles formed by tritons blowing conch shells. The original design drawing lent by the Tiffany & Co. Archives details the various cast elements decorating the body, including the figural handles, swirling shell decoration encircling the body, and seaweed border. The inscription on the neck is expertly acid-etched, a process of decorating metal where the desired pattern is painted on with an acid-resistant liquid before acid is applied to the surface, eating away at any uncovered areas, leaving the design in relief. Tiffany & Co. was known for their elaborate acid-etched script and it can be seen on a number of pieces in the exhibition.

Goelet Cup for Schooners, 1891, Whiting Manufacturing Co., advertisement

The monumental 1891 Goelet Cup for Schooners, awarded to General Paine’s Volunteer, features a dynamic design of seahorses and cresting waves. The ornamentation was achieved by combining a variety of silversmithing techniques including chasing, repoussé, and acid- etching. Chasing is a technique in which the silversmith works on the outside of an object pushing the material in, and repoussé is a process where the design is created by working on the inside and pushing the silver out. Here, the bodies of the horses are rendered using repoussé, while details such as ears, flaring nostrils, and webbed feet are brought to life through additional chasing.

A delicate acid etched pattern creates an almost wallpaperlike background. This trophy was one of many of Whiting Manufacturing Co.’s commissions used to advertise the firm’s extravagant productions.

As artworks the cups generated their own press through their public display at world’s fairs, in shop exhibits, and in trade and popular publications. The 1886 Sloop cup, for example, displayed at the Whiting Manufacturing Co.’s New York location in Union Square, was touted as one of the firm’s signal achievements. But it was the competitors and the races themselves—among the first American sporting contests to attract national media attention— that also generated interest in the trophies. In 1885, for example, the race results were printed in St. Albans, Vermont and in San Jose, California. An image of the 1886 Schooner Cup with accompanying description ran in the Bismarck Daily Tribune of North Dakota and the Helena Weekly Herald of Montana. The most detailed coverage was printed in New York and along the East Coast. New York

Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, Jr. was a particularly avid reporter, not surprisingly, as Bennett was a two-time commodore of NYYC and devoted yachtsman. In America’s Cup years the frequent coverage of the trophies would take an even more important tone, as the contests were an early indicator of the leading vessels vying to represent NYYC as the defender of the cup.

The Goelet Cup races came to an end when Ogden Goelet died in 1897. However, the tradition was immediately picked up, and continued in perpetuity by John Jacob Astor. NYYC continues to race for the Astor Cup, on the Annual Regatta, just as the Goelet Cups were. With a year’s delay and the exception of war years, the tradition of the Goelet Cups continues unbroken today, with the trophies commissioned at the end of the nineteenth century remaining some of the most elaborate and creative ever awarded.

Spectacular Silver: Yachting’s Goelet Cups is organized by the NYYC in partnership with the Redwood Library & Athenæum in celebration of the NYYC’s 175th anniversary in 2019. The exhibition draws largely from the NYYC collections with additional loans coming from the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Salve Regina University, Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club, Tiffany & Co., and private collections. Spectacular Silver runs June 14 – September 29, 2019.

Alice Dickinson is Curator of Collections for New York Yacht Club and lead curator for Spectacular Silver: Yachting’s Goelet Cups.

All images New York Yacht Club, Ellen McDermott Photography

r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 5

Slavery and The Founding of The Redwood Library

by Sean D. Moore, Ph.D. Have you ever wondered how the Founding Fathers obtained families made wealthy by Atlantic trade, to the Savannah Library the political ideas that went into the writing of the Declaration Society in Georgia, proprietary subscription libraries met the high of Independence and the Constitution? How did they pay for cost of imported books through the combining of slaveholders’ their educations, books, and home décor? What about our oldest resources. In this regard, Northern and Southern libraries are not institutions of learning, which they attended or to which they so different; indeed, my book’s examination of libraries in both subscribed, like universities, museums, and libraries? Most scholars regions demonstrates that the cultural development of both was these days have concluded that slavery and related enterprises like dependent on slavery for capitalization, showing that both the sugar, rum, tobacco, and shipbuilding were not only the basis for North and the South were implicated not only in the trades in the entire American economy at the time, but also the means by slaves and their products, but also in the cultural capital that these which American education, culture, and the arts were capitalized trades created. Crucially, these libraries—slavery-created “reading before the Industrial Revolution. In my research it has become clear networks”—were also social networks for their members and for that it was the philanthropy of men involved in these enterprises their communities at large. Their function may not have always that endowed our most foundational institutions—new knowledge primarily been reading, but also the furtherance of the businesses of that should make us skeptical of the idea that all public services those involved—people whose good taste in books enhanced their can be provided by private charity instead of reputations and, therefore, their commercial government like in the “good old days.” networking prospects. They were therefore Most scholars these days have I have chosen to focus my most recent an important part of the associational culture concluded that slavery and related work on the five main early American sweeping the Atlantic world at the time, enterprises like sugar, rum, tobacco, libraries—the Redwood, the Salem and so should be regarded as central to the and shipbuilding were not only Athenæum, the New York Society Library, cultural history of the English-speaking the basis for the entire American the Library Company of Philadelphia, world. As Mark Towsey and Kyle Roberts economy at the time, but also and the Charleston Library Society—not have pointed out in Before the Public Library, the means by which American only because these institutions were the libraries across this oceanic community education, culture, and the arts were product of slavery, but also because the served as “venues for conviviality and social capitalized before the Industrial books in them also fostered abolitionist networking, and as fulcra for other kinds Revolution. sentiment for some readers. These libraries of civic behavior, including philanthropy, stood at the confluence of two transatlantic social reform and cultural politics.” These branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. My institutions’ blending of civic, financial, and cultural functions new book, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: provides the basis for this book’s efforts to tie together the analysis British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, of such libraries by reference to their effects on early American civic 1731-1814 (Oxford UP, 2019), bridges the study of these trades by engagement at the time of the Revolution. The stories that library demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested proprietors were consuming were bound up with the stories that in imported British books. In doing so, it also provides evidence they were telling about their own lives and communities—narratives that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand patterned, in part, on the lives about which they were reading. These of slave owners for art and literature in the English taste. This early libraries, their books, and their members, in short, were crucial book draws on recent scholarship that shows how participation in players in the cultural history producing America’s stories.

These “social libraries” exemplified and displayed the intellectual, London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that men involved in slavery-related businesses cultural, and social capital created by slavery. Documenting their were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford shareholders’ reading habits with their activities in slavery also to import that culture. In short, this book argues that the empire- reveals that it was not only these agricultural and industrial activities wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of that were brought into being by the trade; colonial professionals’ paperwork of news, insurance, banking, and law was also connected the African diaspora. to slavery-related commerce. The books in these libraries created General Findings what reader-response theorist Stanley Fish calls “interpretive The central general findings from this study are that what I communities” within these central spaces of reading for Atlantic port have been describing as characteristic of the five main libraries cities engaged in transoceanic commerce. In such communities, texts under analysis is that most, if not all, cultural institutions in the are not as important as readers; meanings are created by a reading eighteenth century were funded in this way. From Portsmouth, network like the library’s proprietors. The remarkable consistency, New Hampshire, where a library called the Athenæum sprang from across all five major libraries, of which titles were most frequently 6 etc. S u m m er 201 9

These “social libraries” exemplified and displayed the intellectual, cultural, and social capital created by slavery. Documenting their shareholders’ reading habits with their activities in slavery also reveals that it was not only these agricultural and industrial activities that were brought into being by the trade; colonial professionals’ paperwork of news, insurance, banking, and law was also connected to slavery-related commerce.

stocked and borrowed indicates that the period’s imported British books were not only creating reading networks in their individual cities, but also a shared English-speaking imagined community across the Eastern seaboard. These libraries thus serve as examples of Michael Warner’s observation that the early American reader saw him or herself “becoming part of an arena of the national people that cannot be realized except through such mediating imaginings” as books. Early American libraries, in short, were crucial to the intellectual and ideological formation of the Continental network that was to become the Republic.

It is not possible to overstate the significance of these centers of reading to the consolidation of the economic, cultural, and political leadership of the colonies and the wider Atlantic world.

The “library books represented an important thread in the social fabric and helped cement the social elite of the seaport city,” writes Isabelle Lehuu, creating a common set of values, assumptions, and, at the very least, topics of conversation that served to reinforce the shared economic interests of library proprietors. Being accepted as a member of one of the libraries, and being able to afford a share and pay periodic fines and assessments, was a sign of one’s citizenship in such an elite. In South Carolina, where a share in the library cost a whopping 50 pounds (about $10,000 in today’s money), “membership secured entry into the ruling class of Charleston.”

In Massachusetts, the first proprietary subscription library was considered a “veritable Social Register of Salem.” In this regard, the prestige of belonging to one of these American institutions mirrored developments within Britain itself, where library membership had become a sign of respectability. Early American libraries, in short, were “philanthropic but exclusive” in their capacity as “elite institutions promoting a liberality that also represented freedom from material need,” as James Raven has written. Slavery, ironically, created that freedom for shareholders, enabling them to become philanthropists to the learned societies, schools, and other organizations that served them and their families.

“I was surprised to find that no matters of philosophy were brought upon the carpet. They talked of privateering and building of vessels.”

— Alexander Hamilton on meeting some proprietors of the Redwood Library

The Redwood Library was one such social network, and as Alexander Hamilton observed, it, like the Library Company of Philadelphia that inspired its creation, was more an institution for the furtherance of business than it was for reading. We have long known that Abraham Redwood himself owned a slave plantation in Antigua and invested in slave-trading voyages. Indeed, the

Ezra Stiles (1770-71), Portrait by Samuel King, Yale University

Dictionary of National Biography reports that, “Without a doubt the slave trade provided Redwood with the enormous profits that allowed him to become, as he was described at his death, ‘the greatest public and private benefactor on Rhode Island.’”

Newport shipping wealth helps explain the town’s library patronage because one had to be quite wealthy to borrow books at the Redwood in the late eighteenth century and poorer people like clergymen could only be “honorary members” by vote of the shareholders. Book historians traditionally have been elliptical about the relationship of this wealth and the slavery behind it to this archive, though Wilmarth Lewis wrote that, “The possibilities of the r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 7

Its lessons about the often unseemly sources of such philanthropy certainly can teach us a set of ethics regarding what gifts we should accept for ourselves and for our institutions.

coast of Guinea were always present in Newporters’ minds.” Gladys Bolhouse mentioned Redwood’s slave wealth in writing a history of the library, and Arthur Roberts indicated that even nineteenthcentury library officers like Robert Johnson owned West Indian estates. Historians of slavery, however, have not been elliptical about this topic and have pointed to just how powerful a social network Newport slave traders and owners were. Jay Coughtry, for example, argued that “Rhode Island merchants controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the American trade in African slaves” in the eighteenth century in his research on Rhode Island’s role in the triangular trade, and that he “rarely found a slaver owned outside of Newport.” Some involved in the trade, like the Lyon family, vertically integrated the business, with the son, William, living in Newport and sending ships out on slave voyages, and the father, Joseph, living in Charleston South Carolina where many of those slaves disembarked. Coughtry identifies Newport grandees in the trade, “the Champlins; Aaron Lopez and Jacob Rivera; John Malbone; the Vernons; and the Wantons.” Interestingly, George Champlin Mason, compiler of the Annals of the Redwood Library during the Victorian period, was descended from one of these families. Even more compelling is that

Henry Collins by John Smibert, c.1736 Redwood Library & Athenæum Collection

8 etc. S u m m er 2019

some of these names are on the list of the original 46 proprietors of the library. William Vernon and Samuel Vernon are listed, as is Stephen Wanton.

This evidence proves that it was not only slave ownership, but also active slave trading that went into the philanthropic foundation of the library. Indeed, Lorenzo Greene, in The Negro in Colonial New England, documents the large scale philanthropy of New England slave traders and shows that many Wantons held Rhode Island governorships and that William Vernon was a prominent patriot.

Greene explains how New England slavers were the wellspring of colonial learning, writing “From the Negro trade, likewise, came a great part of the wealth that afforded slave trading magnates the necessary leisure for cultural and intellectual leadership.”

Greene specifically cites the slaving foundations of the Redwood as a principal example of this connection between slavery and intellectual life. More recently, Rachel Chernos Lin has shown how Newport slavers diversified their investment portfolios, becoming “active in banking, insurance, and real estate” and branching into manufacturing. Even America’s first cotton mill in Pawtucket was founded, in part, with the slave capital of Moses Brown. It is clear, then, that the business of human trafficking was at the root of the economic success that gave rise to cultural and intellectual life in the form of libraries and other institutions of learning.

By 1790, the Annals of the Redwood Library, by George Champlin Mason, show that most of the major slave trading families were represented at the Redwood as proprietors or members. William Vernon and Gideon Wanton are listed, as are Christopher Champlin, John Malbone, and Abraham Rodriguez Rivera. In fact, William Vernon and John Malbone were chosen as Directors of the Library in October 1785, indicating that they may have had a say in book acquisitions. One Moses Lopez, brother of Aaron Lopez, the wealthiest man involved in Newport slavery, was voted a director as early as September 1749. The presence in the Redwood membership of so many members of families who derived at least part of their wealth from the slave trade shows how hard it is to disentangle the relationship of slavery to book acquisitions and reading in the eighteenth century.

There is a cautionary tale in Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries, for it not only explores the beginnings of American culture in imported British books, but also investigates the slavery origins of American cultural philanthropy, that which sustains projects like my book in the waning days of taxpayer support for universities, the humanities, and students who study them. Its lessons about the often unseemly sources of such philanthropy certainly can teach us a set of ethics regarding what gifts we should accept for ourselves and for our institutions.

Sean D. Moore, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries, recently published by Oxford University Press.

The Father of American Libraries

by Don Dery He was whip smart, determined, financially adept, and a true visionary.

His name was Abraham Redwood, born in 1709, sixth of the seven children of Abraham Redwood, Sr. (1665-1729) and his wife Mehetable Langford Redwood (1678-1715). The large family traveled frequently between their home in Bristol, England, and the senior Abraham’s land investment’s in the Caribbean island of Antigua, where his business partner was another investment-savvy Brit, Jonas Langford, whose family owned several profitable sugar plantations on the Island.

In 1712, the Redwood family relocated from England to Salem, MA, probably to be closer to their home-away-from-home on Antigua, where the senior Abraham was eager to become part of the financial whirlwind described by his partner, Jonas Langford.

The financial return of a slave-operated sugar plantation was far greater than anything Abraham had found in England.

As he matured, the young Abraham married Martha Coggeshell (1709-1760), daughter of another wealthy family heavily invested in the Antigua sugar business. Abraham and Martha had six children, the first named Jonas Langford Redwood (1730-1779) in honor of both his mother’s lineage and his father’s business partner. They also had a Mehetable, named after her grandmother; an Abraham, named after both his grandfather and father; and a Martha, named after her mother. Their other two children were William and Elizabeth.

Abraham became the owner of an Antigua sugar plantation called Cassada Gardens, in 1788. It was a 1,000-acre estate owned in 1709 (the years of Abraham’s birth) by William Redwood, who inherited the property from his grandfather Jonas Langford. In 1750, the estate passed to the Honorable Abraham Redwood, young Abraham’s father, and then to Abraham. (In 1829, Cassada Gardens was inherited by Jonas Langford Redwood, Abraham’s grandson, who died in 1844. It then became the property of Jonas’s heirs, declined in size to 598 acres, and eventually passed from the Redwood’s to another family.)

Young Abraham made a fortune from Cassada Gardens, and was able to retire in his mid-thirties as the second wealthiest man in the American colonies. His wife, Mehetable had passed away in 1715; he remarried, to Patience Howland Philips (1687-1745), purchased a home in Marblehead, MA, in 1720, and by 1726 he and Patience had five children (despite her first name!).

In 1741, at age 32, Abraham and Patience moved to Newport, RI, in a home on Thames Street overlooking what was visible from their location: Newport Harbor, and the bustling commercial activity in one of colonial America’s busiest ports. They also owned a 145-acre farm, Redwood Farm, in nearby Portsmouth, R.I., and spent their time between the two homes.

Abraham was not content to sit idly and count his money.

A relative, Robert Redwood, had lived on the north side of King Street, in Bristol, England, from 1738 to 1746. He was a merchant, and decided to open half of his home to the public as a library, the first lending library established in the U.K.

Abraham Redwood by Samuel King, c.1785 Redwood Library & Athenæum Collection

Abraham spent much of his time counseling young men on ways to make a livelihood: a botanical garden of rare indigenous plants; how to build a latrine; bee keeping; the workings of a cider machine, and so on.

He quickly realized the curiosity of so many young adults indicated they were hungry for knowledge, but books were very costly in the American colonies because of the lack of adequate print shops. What these young men needed, he felt, was a library “with nothing in view but the good of mankind.” He convinced forty-five other successful businessmen to join with him, and he founded what we now enjoy as the Redwood Library and Athenæum.

A Charter from the King of England was received in 1747, construction began on the beautifully designed building, and the Redwood Library opened in 1750. Abraham had donated £500, a small fortune in those days, to purchase in London a collection of standard works on literature, theology, history and the sciences. He also donated another £500 to the Society of Friends to endow a school for the education of children of the group, and £500 to establish a college in Providence, RI. The Redwood Library was an immediate success with men and women of letters, students, artists, and interested citizens. It gave Newport the reputation as “the most learned and inquisitive community in the Colonies.”

The reputation continues today.

Don Dery is a Corporate Communications Consultant and etc.

Editorial Advisor.

r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 9

Sporting Sparkling Necklaces Ketchup, Soy Sauce and Champagne

by Anne Ewbank Whether on Dom Pérignon or plonk, wine labels tend to feature elegant lettering, illustrations of rolling green hills, and the promise of an unrivaled taste experience. Your average bottle of soy sauce or ketchup might have a recipe on the side.

But starting in the 18th century, one kind of label symbolized both wealth and good taste. By using elegant silver attached to small chains, British silversmiths created labels for customers’ wines and sauces. Either a simple etched word or an elaborate medallion, these labels were both useful and beautiful.

In Georgian Britain, wines flooded into the nation from all over the world. But the opaque bottles hid their contents. Plus, wines and liquors of the period often contained sediment, and their containers could be banged-up and dirty after a long journey.

For the discerning, a filthy, unfiltered bottle of wine on the dinner table would be unthinkable. At high-class tables, wine needed to be poured into a clear decanter before serving. To mark which wines were inside, decanters sported “bottle tickets,” or silver wine labels, hung around their necks. Made from silver, silver-plate, enamel, and even mother-of-pearl, their shapes and designs were equally varied, from scrolls to Fox line label from 1849 escutcheons to elaborate cutout letters.

Silver firms owned by Hester Bateman and James Phipps made labels for everything from champagne and sherry to curaçao and hock, a type of German white wine. Wine labels could be made and used abroad, with Collection of sauce labels the most fascinating example being Chinese bat-shaped wine labels. Yet, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has a large collection of wine labels, they were “peculiarly English and never became fashionable abroad.” But in Britain, the custom was crucial. When a captain served an un-decanted bottle of Moselle wine at a regimental dinner, his commander, mistaking it for the beer he had forbidden, had him arrested. The ensuing furor, which included a duel and a trial in the House of Lords, was known as the “Black Bottle Affair.”

Sauces, whose cruets were often elaborately cut glass, making it hard to see what was inside, also got the silver-label treatment.

Like with wine, the taste for sauces was surprisingly global. In fact, writes John Salter in Sauce Labels, 1750-1950, “From 1780 for some 10 etc. S u m m er 2 01 9

60-odd years, the demand for a wide range of sauces was incessant.”

Often, sauce containers came in sets called “soy frames.” After all, in the mid-18th century, soy sauce was on wealthy British tables, along with flavored vinegars, spicy kyan, or cayenne sauces, chili sauces, and a range of ketchups, from walnut to mushroom. Labels existed for all of them, even sauces that today are almost unknown, such as Harvey’s sauce, made with anchovies and colored with cochineal, and the gloriously named Zoobditty fish sauce.

Medicine bottles also sometimes had silver labels describing the inner contents. Describing a label inscribed with the slightly terrifying word “acid,” the Steppes Hill Farm Antiques website notes that doctors provided mildly stimulating acids to “Hypochondriacs and…persons afflicted with flatulence.”

According to Wine Labels, 1780-2003, published by the Wine Label Circle, as the Victorian era went on, “improvement in the production of wine enabled it to be served straight from the bottle.” That, along with new legislation allowing wine to be sold in stores, meant that paper labels became standard. Plus, writes Salter, as “transport facilities improved, less reliance was placed on highly flavored sauces to make Champagne label 1750 food palatable.” Silver labels, for both sauce and wine, became novelties, and then nearly unknown.

XXXBut there’s one big exception. The Wine Label Circle is a passionate group of collectors with twice-annual meetings that publishes books on the history of silver Sherry label created by Hester labels of all types. While the Bateman around 1790 wines and sauces they helped identify are long gone, the silver labels that adorned them continued to be celebrated.

Anne Ewbank is a New York-based writer with an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University. She was an English minor and awarded staff writer during her undergraduate experience at Occidental College. Ewbank has held various titles of associate editor and editorial fellow and enjoys writing content about history and food.

Reprinted with Permission: Atlas Obscura Photos courtesy of Steppes Hill Farm Antiques Ltd., Sittingbourne, Kent, England

Treasures o f t h e R e dw o o d

William Borden Juner, his book, November 20, 1760 A notebook of navigation exercises.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Verner Z. Reed

Photo: Jessica Pohl

Borden’s notebook consists of problems in plain sailing and tacking; in the setting of courses and the determination of position; and in the magnetic variations of the compass. Each problem is embellished with a diagram. The date 1760 appears in the heading of the text; a scribbled note at the last page includes the date 16 January, 1820.

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Per Barclay: Painting with Oil, Sculpting with Water Fig. 1, Per Barclay, Rue Visconti # 14, 2010, framed c print mounted to aluminum 161 x 200 cm (unframed).

by Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. In Rue Visconti # 14 (2010, fig.1), the world tilts upside down, but so delicately, not a book slides out of place. A library is reflected with stunning clarity in a glassy smooth, smoky gray surface. Glance up towards the top of the photograph: note how the bottom shelf of the wall of books draws a horizon line that extends across the upper register of the image, before turning sharply to sweep across the adjacent wall. All the shelves pictured below are reflections of those that lie above—unseen but cunningly doubled—so that they appear to spill down the page in reverse, heedless of gravity. Alabaster columns seem to float in front of the bookcase, and only the charcoal tones of their reflection betray the darkened mirror—oil—that holds their likeness in such treacly perfection.

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Deep inside a Swiss bank vault, form also dissolves in glossy blackness in La Banque, Geneve, 2005 (fig.2). Here the walls are clad in a steel grid of boxes that advance with military order toward an imaginary disappearing point, hiding valuables behind a mask of uniformity to produce an image of impenetrable, boundless surface. Both of these photographs by Norwegian artist Per Barclay document the site-specific installations he calls Oil Rooms, which he produces by bathing a room in oil to create an inky false floor. This summer Barclay has constructed Oil Room (Redwood) (2019) in Abraham Redwood’s eighteenth-century summer house, transforming the interior of the summerhouse (through clever artifice!) into a dark mirror, a viscous pool of oil that will reflect incoming light through the windows, even as it might prompt

Fig. 2, Per Barclay La Banque, Geneve II, 2005, framed c print mounted to aluminum 160 x 200 cm (unframed).

Fig. 3, Caravaggio’s Narcissus at the Source (1597-1599)

questions about our complicated dependency on this “black gold.” Barclay creates a mirrored pool, one that remembers Narcissus and Additionally, for the exhibition Per Barclay: House Of Oil And his fatal follies, inscribes this contemporary installation within a Water, Barclay will exhibit in the Pierce Prince gallery La Banque, long history, embedding it not only in a material lineage of artists Geneve, Rue Visconti # 14 and several monumental photographs that who use oil to paint with, but also inserting it in a tradition of document these and other site-specific interventions.

Narcissus paintings, where oil thickens into the illusion of a liquid Barclay’s Oil Room (Redwood) pools oil into a literal and mirror to reveal the dangerous excesses of ego. In Caravaggio’s metaphoric ground that invites us to pause, Narcissus at the Source (1597-1599, fig. 3) summer Barclay has and to behold, this omnipresent but largely This for instance, the body of water, painted in invisible substance that powers our lives. constructed Oil Room (Redwood) tenebrous shades of mahogany brown and His work repurposes fuel as pigment—as (2019) in Abraham Redwood’s inky blacks, both serves as a cautionary tale a material of art—to highlight oil as sticky eighteenth-century summer house, on an obsession with appearance (or surface), fluid, a viscous and dark liquid, rather than transforming the interior of the and captures how that very condition of an abstract entity that flows (strategically summerhouse (through clever being a “mere” surface defines what it is to hidden from view) from gas pumps into cars artifice!) into a dark mirror, a viscous be a painting: a displaced reflection onto and planes. By using oil as paint—relocating pool of oil that will reflect incoming the world. Barclay extends both these it into the interior of the summerhouse light through the windows, even as propositions. Whereas Caravaggio painted through an explicit, almost startling act of it might prompt questions about water with gloomy shades of oil paint, artistic dislocation—Barclay pulls oil out of our complicated dependency on Barclay paints with oil itself, smoothing the unseen flow of daily life and use, distills this “black gold.” it into the illusion of a flattened image, a it as image, and frames it architecturally. It’s film that calls up the history of oil painting as if he hangs it like a picture on a wall. By redefining oil as “art,” and the Platonic mistrust of surface, all the while marshalling a Barclay trains our attention on it, materializing an abstraction into a very contemporary caution about our society of consumption and substance with a politics of extraction, and enormous environmental overvaluing of appearance. Yet, like the photograph of the Swiss and social costs. bank vault, an image of inscrutable surface that underscores what In this way, Barclay’s careful distillation of oil into paint serves we cannot see, Barclay’s use of oil as surface inevitably—and very as a mirror onto the underside of late modernity, creating an actual intentionally—implies infinite and unknown depth. object of self-reflection on the floor of the summerhouse. That r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 13

By positioning the viewer outside the work, in a distanced space of beholding, these works intimate histories of the viewer as a passive consumer of spectacle; yet they equally create a contemplative space, whereby an image may prompt imagination and spark action.

Along with Oil Room (Redwood), Barclay exhibits Untitled (2018, fig. 4) in the Redwood’s Delivery Room, a glass house where pumped water sloshes gently and rhythmically around the interior walls and ceilings of a seven-foot structure. Though the transparency of the glass house and the water offer a visual counter to the opacity of oil, the core content of the work—our planet’s diminishing natural resources, and the invitation to pause with this thought—probes similar questions of sustainability and environmental management. Moreover, Barclay sees the glass structure as “an extension” of his oil rooms in that both deny the audience the possibility of entry, attenuating tactile, olfactory and sensory experiences into purely optical ones. By positioning the viewer outside the work, in a distanced space of beholding, these works intimate histories of the viewer as a passive consumer of spectacle; yet they equally create a contemplative space, whereby an image may prompt imagination and spark action. As Barclay puts

Fig. 4, Per Barclay, Untitled, 2018, steel structure, glass, wooden base, pump system, water 190 x 190 x 207 cm. Installation OSL contemporary, Oslo 2018.

it: “to some extent, the greenhouse is a three-dimensional version of the oil room where the continuous relationship between the inside and outside, the active and the passive, always is present.”

The artist, by displacing mundane liquids like oil and water into unusual environments and frameworks, highlights their material politics: their economic value and social utility, along with the environmental damage, human cost and capitalist geopolitics of their extraction, accumulation and trade. Moreover, by repositioning these substances in actual or symbolic structures from the early phase of colonial modernism, Barclay calls attention to the shape and history of specific, culturally embedded architectural forms, such as a summer house, or a greenhouse. If the summer house is an emblem of garden leisure, the Victorian greenhouse, stuffed with tropical specimens, largely gathered in dubious conditions, articulates histories of colonial exploration and the immoderate stripping of resources that defined the mid-nineteenth century origins of colonial modernity. Indeed Victorian England was the golden age of greenhouses, when the largest of them were designed and built, especially in colonial capitals like London and Brussels. Crystal Palace—the 1851 temple of spectacle—formed the apotheosis of the greenhouse Joseph Paxton had originally invented in 1836 for Chatsworth to house Victoria Amazonica, the enormous lily pads named for the British queen (the sturdy ribs of which inspired the greenhouse’s ribbed structure).

In the following decade, the 1860s, oil was discovered in the US. Both the extraction of oil and the ensuing reliance on carbon fuels, along with the botanical/medicinal project of what Cambridge historian Richard Drayton calls the “useful garden” of “scientific empire” speak to a long moment in the nineteenth century when Western society entertained the delusion that humans could classify, understand, and govern nature.1 We now know that myth of control to be potentially fatal. It simplifies complex natural ecosystems that are almost unknowable into formulaic systems of profit and loss, just as it dismisses the richness of indigenous cultures, believing that both could be ruthlessly plundered. Barclay, by connecting contemporary processes of waste and consumption with their origin in the archetypal midnineteenth century architectural forms and materials of modernity, draws a line between the present and the past, drilling down into history to draw our attention to the 1850 and 1860s—the heyday of colonialism—as the origin of modernity.

Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Global Contemporary Art Dept. Head, Theory & History of Art & Design, RISD Curator of Contemporary Projects, Redwood Library & Athenæum

Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). See also Lucille H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. (New York: Academic Press, 1979).

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On the Trail with the Music Hunters

by Armand Aromin and Benedict Gagliardi

American folk music has long been dutifully recorded by scholars, folklorists, and ballad hunters and one can find a representative song collection from all but six US states. It is perplexing that three of those (Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island), despite their long histories and active folk music communities, lack a distinct collection of their own. Through our experiences at folk festivals, camps, and other musical gatherings, we have plainly observed many regional American repertoires and styles that are actively and proudly represented, and it led us to ponder: Are there Rhode Island folk songs? Aside from the mighty works of Jon Campbell, one might offer “Rhode Island is Famous for You”, but this Broadway number is not truly endemic to the state and doesn’t offer a satisfactory representation of our musical heritage. Recognizing this deficit, we took it upon ourselves to build such a compendium for Rhode Island.

For the past four years, our mission has been to locate and revive old songs and instrumental folk music from and about the state of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. The material we seek includes treasured ballads passed down in the oral tradition, topical songs of the day printed and sold on ephemeral broadside sheets, historical ballads, lyrical poetry and verses, dance tunes in the local fiddle repertoire, vocal and instrumental compositions that have passed into the public subconscious, and even bygone ditties mechanically preserved in musical clockworks.

We sift through every printed and digital resource related to New England Folk music that we can find in search of Rhode Island titles, topics, authors, and printings. Our approach to compiling a Rhode Island repertoire goes beyond the academic process of researching, aggregating, and publishing. “Folk music” is a tumultuously difficult term to define, and we are sure that not all the music we have collected so far would be categorized as such in any number of technical interpretations. First, and foremost, we are folk musicians and review the pieces in question through this lens of our experience. There is little pleasure in donning an ill-fitting cap, so while a piece of music might be intended for the classicallyminded, we’ll happily tailor something to better fit the likes of a fiddle, a concertina, and a pair of harmonized vocals.

The benefit of online research in the digital age has allowed us to find relevant material bit by bit from numerous esoteric sources.

In this manner we came across Carmina Collegensia: A Complete Collection of the Songs of the American Colleges (Waite, 1876), which produced significant additions to our collection, including “The Settlement of Rhode Island” written by Charles Thurber Miller in 1874. The quirky account of Roger Williams’ founding of Providence includes some colorful lines concerning the natural

recycling of his bodily remains by the apple tree under which he was buried in 1683, as well as his later exhumation in 1860. We often perform this song and once, while sharing it with other singers in England, a listener noted a similarity to a game song she knew as a child called “Old Roger is Dead”. After a thorough scouring of our host’s extensive library of songbooks, we found in The Singing Game (1985) by Iona and Peter Opie that the earliest version of the song seems to have come from Rhode Island c.1850. This is one example of how singing these songs, rather than just collecting them, can lead to more finds.

Aside from song books we also forage through accounts of local history, and cull lyrical poetry from Rhode Island authors. But the most interesting sources of localized balladry are broadsides– cheap, ephemeral sheets of paper printed on a single side that were ubiquitously peddled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in North America. Broadsides offered an early platform for anonymous social commentary that allowed forms of expression that are not well captured in history books.

“The Settlement of Rhode Island” (1874) written by Charles Thurber Miller & illustrated by Walter Francis Brown.

Photo Credit: www.quahog.org

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Oral tradition is the key to what makes folk songs our natural companions.

When learned songs are sung, they are alive. They are a currency that is traded and transferred across generations through singing, listening, and memorizing with varying interpretations.

“Old Indian Hymn” from Indian Melodies (1845) by Thomas Commuck, harmonized by Thomas Hastings. Photo Credit: www.archive.org

The Rhode Island broadside ballads we have compiled thus far span three centuries and their content includes the Revolutionary and Civil wars, the Dorr Rebellion, morbidry, commercial jingles, and even johnnycakes. Broadside ballads were meant to be sold and one tactic to attracting buyers was the use of an appealing and familiar air. An excess of broadside texts are suggested to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” or “Auld Lang Syne”, but there are others that use rarer melodies that offer a more well-rounded taste of the music of the day. One example is a gallows confessional ballad of the Newport-born pirate, Charles Gibbs (1798-1831) that is set to an air called “The Rocks of Scilla”, of which we employed a unique variation.

Ballad Collectors Oral tradition is the key to what makes folk songs our natural companions. When learned songs are sung, they are alive. They are a currency that is traded and transferred across generations through singing, listening, and memorizing with varying interpretations.

Through this so-called “folk process” they’re allowed to gradually change and evolve into unique descendant forms as lyrics and 16 etc. S u m m er 2 01 9

melodies are misremembered, lost, or replaced. Long before the densely interconnected web of social media, before even the radio, internalized music that could be summoned from the brain or fingers had irreplaceable value.

The preservation of New England folk songs is due to the work of a handful of mostly women song collectors in the early-tomid 1900s, who had the foresight to record this valuable material before it was lost to the increasingly popular media of the day. The most important ballad hunter to come through Rhode Island was Helen Hartness Flanders who collected all over New England after securing the folk songs of her native Vermont in the 1930s. Along with her associate Marguerite Olney she recorded about 200 songs and fiddle tunes from 40 Rhode Islanders in the 1940s. Their field recordings are available online via Middlebury College for anyone to listen to and interpret as we have. One exceedingly localized song she encountered was a comical ditty set to the melody of George F. Root’s “Bright Eyed Little Nell of Narragansett Bay”. The parody, “Old Kingston Jail” was sung for her by David Matteson of Lafayette, RI and is a humorous account of a stint in the old Washington County prison.

Concerning Fiddle Music And Instrumental Compositions There is no dearth of instrument folk music with Ocean State ties. John Griffiths, a travelling dance master, published the first book of social dances in America entitled, A Collection of the Newest and Most Fashionable Country Dances and Cotillions in Providence in 1788. Nearly sixty years later, in 1847, a Glocester native named George Saunders published A New Scientific Self-Instructing School for the Violin. Some of his tunes such as “Smith’s Reel” and the “Picnic Reel” have become staples in Irish and Cape Breton music repertoires though few are aware of their Rhode Island roots.

Other instrumental pieces apt for inclusion in the Rhode Island folk music compendium bear relevant titles such as the “The Bells of Newport” from the Murphy Manuscript (1790) and “The Kentish Guards’ March” (commonly known as “The Road to Boston”); “Dorr’s Retreat” and “Dorr’s Return” which feature in Elias Howe Jr.’s second volume of The Musician’s Companion (1843).

Some, like “Belles of Providence” by Oliver Shaw (1779-1848), “The Fascination Schottische” by J.H. Jennings (active 1896-1902), and “Narragansett Waltz no.1 & 2” by J. Henry Seipp (c.18011875) were written by residents and non-residents alike (Seipp being the outlier). Others require digging in more unlikely nooks, like the generically titled “March” and “Hornpipe”, which were included in a musical clock (recently exhibited at the Redwood Library) by Thomas Claggett, offering a brief glimpse into some of the fashionable tunes of the day.

The oldest traditional piece with a Rhode Island connection, “Old Indian Hymn”, can be found in Thomas Commuck’s Indian Melodies (1845). Commuck (1804-1855), a Narragansett Indian, is considered to be the first Native American to publish a musical work. Nestled within his collection of compositions is a haunting melody which includes the following description: “The Narragansett Indians have a tradition, that the following tune was heard in the air by them [...] many years before the arrival of the whites in America; and that on their first visiting a church in Plymouth Colony...the same tune was sung while performing divine service, and the Indians knew it as well as the whites. The tune therefore is preserved among them to this day...”

Newport Gardner (born Occramer Marycoo in 1746), was a former slave and trained musician who bought his freedom in Newport. He is best known for his composition, “Promise Anthem”, though frustratingly, this and the rest of his music no longer exists.

He is often credited, erroneously, as the composer for a fiddle tune called “Crooked Shanks”, which is disputed by noted scholar Kate Van Winkle Keller.

Folk songs offers a sense of place to both singers and listeners and we hope that the long-dormant material that we resurrect and reanimate will fill the Rhode Island-shaped void in the American folk music experience.

Unsurprisingly, the nature of our research and the resources available has skewed our results towards the Anglo-centric. While there were certainly musicians of color known for their musical ability around the state, we only have passing references as to who they were and the kinds of music they made. To fully appreciate our musical heritage, we hope to uncover more material from folks like Commuck, Gardner, and other underrepresented communities that did not gain equal real estate on the history book pages. With regards to gender, we’ve been happy to see a relatively balanced representation in the authors, collectors and characters in Rhode Island folk songs. Three quarters of the singers that Flanders and Olney recorded were women, many of our state’s loveliest broadside ballads and lyrical poems were authored by women, and one of the more widespread old songs of Rhode Island extraction, “The Dying Californian” was penned by Kate Harris in 1850.

The end goal of our efforts is not to shuffle this material into yet another printed resource reserved for the academic, but to sow these forgotten songs back into public use. From the performance stage and social singing activities to published musings and videos on social media, we wish to restore Rhode Island’s musical heritage by spreading it to singers and musicians across the generational spectrum. We do not desire to bear the burden of being the sole keepers of this music, and we certainly claim no ownership over it.

Our renditions are just one interpretation of a myriad of possibilities and should not be treated as gospel. Consider this a call to voices to do your own digging, sing local, and sing often! As our friend Deborah Cowan says: “folk music is not a spectator sport”. So, dear reader, we kindly encourage you to leave the sidelines and join us in the field.

Based in Providence, Armand Aromin and Benedict Gagliardi are seekers and singers of old songs and cultivators of local music.

Though a violin maker and entomologist by training, the duo have become independent scholars of old Rhode Island folk music and perform the music they uncover as a duo, The Vox Hunters.

The Forget Me Not Songster (1840) including “Charles Gibbs.”

Photo Credit: Archive.org

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At The AthenĂŚum

18 etc. etc. SSu um mm mer er 22019 01 9 Photos: Jessica Pohl

r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 19 Photos: Peter Silvia

Exhibitions at The Redwood Spectacular Silver: Yachting’s Goelet Cups This landmark exhibition features the elaborate silver sailing trophies commissioned by New York real estate magnate Ogden Goelet for the New York Yacht Club races held off Newport in the last decades of the nineteenth century (1882-1897). Organized by the New York Yacht Club in collaboration with the Redwood Library & Athenæum, the presentation features a dozen Goelet trophies and a range of exceptional historic material—from yacht models and marine paintings to trophy designs—that locates the Goelet ‘cups’ within the yachting culture of Gilded Age Newport.

Goelet Cup for Schooners, 1886, Sterling silver, Tiffany & Co., New York Yacht Club.

Photo: Alice Dickinson

Curators: Alice Dickinson and Benedict Leca June 14 – September 29, 2019 Van Alen Gallery

Per Barclay: House of Oil and Water Norwegian artist Per Barclay is presenting three bodies of work in this sitespecific commission, Oil Room in the Redwood’s eighteenth-century summer house; Untitled, a 7-foot glass house where Rue Visconti # 14 (2010 pumped water sloshes gently and rhythmically around the interior walls and ceilings in the Delivery Room and monumental photographs documenting Barclay’s earlier site-specific installations in the Peirce Prince gallery. These include a library reflected with stunning clarity in a mirror of oil Rue Visconti # 14, a Swiss bank vault seemingly floating atop it, La Banque, Geneve, 2005, and other oily interventions.

Made possible by Cornelius C. Bond and Ann E. Blackwell and the Hartfield Foundation.

Curator: Leora Maltz-Leca June 28 – September 29, 2019 Peirce Prince Gallery, Delivery Room and Summer House

Russell Lee: A Documentarian’s Personal Kodachromes A stalwart of Franklin D. R o o s e v e l t ’s Farm Security Administration ( F S A ) photographic documentation project of the 1930s, Russell Lee’s legacy has up to now rested largely on his iconic black & white photographs of rural America. Presenting material heretofore never exhibited publicly, the exhibition comprises a body of enlarged color kodachromes taken by Lee during trips to Mexico and Norway during the 1950s and 60s, offering up the late, personal visions in rich color of an artist known for his haunting documentary photographs.

Curators: Leora Maltz-Leca and Benedict Leca Opening Autumn 2019 Van Alen Gallery

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the Past and

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Become a Redwood Member redwoodlibrary.org/membership Tel: 401.847.0292 x 115

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Back cover graphic: Fleming + Company

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The Redwood Library & Athenaeum is a member of the Museum Travel Alliance (MTA), a consortium of museums whose patrons and supporters are passionate about cultural travel. MTA offers affiliated museums and cultural institutions access to a curated selection of travel opportunities led by renowned curators and scholars.

Join the MTA and the Redwood Library & Athenaeum on journeys that awaken new insights into art and culture. Visit UNESCO World Heritage sites, enjoy exclusive events, see private collections, and travel on elegant chartered ships and luxury trains.

Consider one of these extraordinary trips: Scottish Sojourn Featuring the Royal Scotsman September 14-23, 2019 Sicily by Sail: Valletta to Catania Aboard Sea Cloud II October 3-11, 2019 Sicily by Sail: Catania to Naples Aboard Sea Cloud II October 10-18, 2019 China: Horizons Along the Yangtze River October 16-31, 2019 Bermuda: Exclusive Collections & Historic Homes December 5-10, 2019 Caribbean Culture: Houses, History & Hamilton Aboard Sea Cloud January 25-31, 2020

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From Redwood Library & AthenĂŚum charter, 1747

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