Art of Collecting
Roderick Terry: The Clergyman Collector Drawings of Touro Synagogue
Fred Wilson: Black Light and Enlightenment
In Focus: Redwood Collects Vintage Newport
The Redwood Library & Athenaeum is an esteemed member of the Museum Travel Alliance (MTA), a consortium of museums dedicated to enriching cultural exploration through exclusive travel. The MTA provides affiliated museums and cultural institutions with access to carefully curated, behind-the-scenes travel experiences led by renowned curators and scholars. Embark on transformative journeys with the MTA and the Redwood, gaining new perspectives on art and culture. Go behind the scenes of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, attend exclusive events in historic venues, join owners to explore their private collections, and experience a bygone era of travel on elegant, privately chartered small ships and luxury trains.
Sicily by Sail: Round-Trip Valletta Aboard Sea Cloud II
October 10 – 18, 2023
Cuba: Art, Culture & History
October 28 – November 3, 2023
Cultural Treasures of Dallas-Fort Worth & the American West
November 2 – 6, 2023
History & Gardens of the Caribbean: Round-Trip Barbados Aboard Emerald Azzurra
February 24 – March 2, 2024
Treasures of Northern Europe, Medieval to Modern: England to Denmark
Aboard Ocean Albatros
April 27 – May 7, 2024
Alluring Aegean: Athens to Istanbul
Aboard Sea Cloud II
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It is in collaboration with you, and the entire community of our forebears, that we have been the anchor institution in Newport and the region for 276 years. Thank you. Certainly, our role as the city’s intellectual center is as vital as ever. But it bears reiterating that in addition to the lectures, concerts and exhibitions we host as a civic commons, we forever remain an active collecting institution as a municipal archive. In short, we enrich lives not only through our programs, but also as much through what we hold, collect and display in the public trust. Last year’s exhibition Treasures of the Redwood: Celebrating 275 Years was proof—if proof were needed—that history is most accessibly apprehended through the material culture of the past; and that even the most abstract of the historian’s theoretical ruminations inevitably must refer back to objects, text to tea cup.
It is for these reasons—and with particular appreciation of the power of object-based learning for our younger patrons—that with the help of generous benefactors we continue to enrich our core collections. Hence the theme of this issue—collecting. Accordingly, you will find in these pages a lead article on collecting—that “gentle madness”—and four pieces that remind that collections are actually rather more people than objects: the first treats Roderick Terry, perhaps the single greatest collector/ benefactor to the Redwood, followed by, successively, one on the set of important architectural drawings of Touro Synagogue bought with the thoughtful largesse of Mrs. Elaine Rosenberg; another on the monumental black Murano glass chandelier by superstar contemporary artist Fred Wilson, acquired through the generosity of a major foundation and seven forward-thinking benefactors listed on p. 13; and a last one on a singular set of photo albums containing historic images of Newport found nowhere else in the city purchased with funds drawn from the 2012 bequest of Lillian and Rudolf Dwyer.
In closing, if collecting is a “disease” or a “gentle madness,” we might view its fruits in the still gentler terms of storytelling and autobiography. In keeping with our mission of operating “with nothing in view but the good of mankind,” what we continue to gather allows us to not only strengthen our community through our shared history, but also to look out onto the world with the satisfaction that we honor history while shaping the present with the collections we hold.
Thank you again, and see you soon at the Redwood,
2 Art of Collecting
nick Basbanes
4 Roderick terry: the Clergyman Collector
Michael simpson
6 Drawings of touro synagogue
Daniel snydacker, Ph.D.
10 Fred Wilson: Black Light and enlightenment
Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D.
14 In Focus: Redwood Collects Vintage newport
Paul Miller
18 At the Athenæum
Celebrating 275 Years
20 exhibitions at the Redwood
etc.
summer 2023 | Vol. IV, 1
redwoodlibrary.org
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Cover:
(Grolier) Club Bindery binding, 1900 for: Songs from the Dramatists
By Robert Bell
new York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1882
Gift of the estate of Roderick terry Jr., september 1951. Formerly owned by Roderick terry (sr.)
the Redwood Library & Athenæum’s commitment to environmental responsibility includes utilizing paper products manufactured through sustainable forest practices and using low VoC inks and solvents.
A friend of mine recently acquired from an antiquarian bookseller a beautifully produced broadside that features an excerpt from a book I wrote in 2002 that expresses, in a few sentences, my considered conviction that every collector is at heart a storyteller, and that every collection is a narrative that reveals as much about the individuals who gather the material as it does about the the material itself.
W hat was especially fun about this piece of ephemera is that I had completely forgotten about it until reminded by Kurt Zimmerman, a Houstonbased, books-about-books collector to the extreme who has made a determined project of acquiring examples of everything I have committed to print, an exercise he pursues with dogged enthusiasm to the point that he contacts me whenever he turns up curiosities such as this, especially when they involves books I have inscribed to various people, to learn what I can tell him anything interesting about the relationship, if any, (since he also collectors what is known as “association” copies.) This is all very flattering, I readily admit, and I comply whenever I can; I even wrote about what it’s like to be an author who is collected with this degree of enthusiasm for Fine Books & Collections (No. 19:4, Autumn 2021).
It took a few seconds to get my bearings on this item, but
once my memory banks were nudged, I recalled the occasion clearly. The handsome broadside had been printed by letterpress on fine paper by Bonnie Thompson Norman, proprietor of the Windowpane Press, in Seattle, Washington, in a run of about 250 copies as a keepsake for the Book Club of Washington to commemorate a talk I gave to the membership in 2006. I pencil-signed and numbered all of them in one sitting before setting out for a memorable meal at Elliot’s Oyster House on the waterfront. I believe I signed a few extras for the booksellers who had invited me to meet with the local bibliophilic community. I enjoyed myself, as I always do when mixing with kindred spirits, but tempus fugit, and this little interlude, and the broadside it engendered, had faded entirely from my consciousness.
I was genuinely surprised, too, to learn that the item had not only enjoyed a life of its own apart from the book it references, but that it has become a collectible item in its own right. As for the text itself, I was equally pleased to re-acquaint myself with a sentiment that I had expressed several decades earlier in Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter of the 21st Century (Henry Holt, New York, 2002), and to conclude that I still stand by every word. Here is the quote, in full:
n umerous libraries in the United s ta tes, I found, owe their very existence to collectors who have had the foresight to place their prize possessions in places where they will be preserved and enjoyed by future generations, and in many instances they established and shaped the focus of the very institutions themselves.
“ What some bibliophiles regard as a specialty, I like to think of as a theme. What some call focus, I call context. Such fine distinctions may well be little more than matters of taste, since both argue strongly for the development of a central plan, yet they support my considered view that every collector is a storyteller, and that every collection a form of narrative, a perspective that raises the process of forming a personal library above the pointless exercise of accumulation without direction. If you are inclined to accept this proposition, it follows that the plot line that emerges is as much a reflection of personality and purpose as it is of life experience.”
I had written Among the Gently Mad as a follow-up to my first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Henry Holt, New York, 1995), which shocked everyone, myself included, when it sold out its modest first printing of 6,000 copies on the first day of publication in August 1995, and once some very strong reviews started to come in, did the same in even greater numbers with two succeeding printings. Over the next two years the title went back to press five more times before finally going into paperback in 1998; an updated edition, and an e-book version, were released in 2013, and as the book approaches its thirtieth birthday in 2025, remains very much in print. It goes without saying that robust sales are always welcome, but even more satisfying, for me, is the knowledge that the book has retained its appeal all this time, and that 1,450 libraries throughout the globe still report having copies in their collections, according to the WorldCat database, and that dozens of colleges and universities that teach history-of-the-book courses include it in their syllabi of suggested and required readings.
How A Gentle Madness struck such a responsive chord so quickly, and how it has maintained such a resonance, is anyone’s guess, and remains a mystery to me, especially since my original proposal for the work had been rejected by more than a dozen trade publishes as being too arcane a subject for the general readership before being taken on by a far-sighted young editor at Henry Holt & Co., who was charmed by the stories of passion and obsession I had assembled, and liked the approach I had taken to go beyond the writing of a conventional history to investigate what was then the here and now of the late 1980s, and early ‘90s with fresh, previously untold examples of what I like to think of as “productive bibliomania,” with a few examples of “unchecked,” and, in one telling instance , “criminal bibliomania,” worked in for balance.
Aside from the magnificent dust-jacket with embossed black and gold decorations and a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s wonderful 1494 woodcut of “The Book Foole” for Sebastian Brandt’s
Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), AGM, also had what everyone agreed was an irresistible title, a coinage that came to me in what I shamelessly claim to have been a moment of pure inspiration, suggested by the patriot-printer and obsessive packrat of all things interesting Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), who had been eulogized at his death by a grandson as having been “touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania.” As “gently mad” as Thomas may have been, his unparalleled collection of early American newspapers and imprints had provided the core collection of the American Antiquarian Society that he founded in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1812. He served as a kind of template for the kind of individual I was looking to profile.
Numerous libraries in the United States, I found, owe their very existence to collectors who have had the foresight to place their prize possessions in places where they will be preserved and enjoyed by future generations, and in many instances they established and shaped the focus of the very institutions themselves. Stand-alone libraries I can cite along those lines include the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island; the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum in New York City; the Henry Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden in San Marino, California; the Henry Clay Folger and Emily Jordan Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC; the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles; the William L. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Another favorite example of mine is the polymath James Logan (1674-1751), a brilliant man who immigrated to North America in 1699 to manage the colony of Pennsylvania for William Penn, and was relentless in his zeal for books that had to be shipped to him from Europe, assembling in the process what was, at the time, the strongest private library on the continent, which in due course became the core collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. This was the same man who had once implored a bookseller in Europe to spare no effort or expense in fulfilling his unending requests for titles, confiding, in a moment of unguarded candor, that “books are my disease.” A gentle madness, indeed.
Nicholas A. Basbanes a national endowment for the Humanities Public scholar, is the author of ten works of cultural history whose most recent book, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, shared top honors in nonfiction for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is now working on a book for Yale University Press to be titled Before Paper:The Hunt for the World’s Earliest Writings, a prequel to his 2013 book, On Paper: The Everything of its 2,000-Year History, a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for excellence in nonfiction.
Roderick Terry was a clergyman who retired to Newport from Manhattan in 1909 and lived there until his death in 1933, becoming in that time among the most significant bibliophile collectors of Gilded Age Newport. A graduate of Yale College in 1870, Terry went on to complete a secondary degree in 1875 from Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Around the same time, Terry married Linda Marquand, the daughter of Henry Marquand, a renowned New York philanthropist, art connoisseur, and frequent summer resident of Newport who was President of the Redwood from 1895 to 1902.
In 1912, Terry was elected a Director of the Redwood Library and appointed to the Committee on Books, the beginning of what was to be decades of support and donations to the Library. In 1914, he donated his first sum of books totaling 257 volumes, in addition to giving $500 (equivalent to about $15,000 today) for new book stacks and the salary of the Redwood’s cataloger. Following in his father-in-law’s footsteps, Terry was elected President of the Redwood Library in 1916 “for his services and the thought, time and money he has continuously contributed.” Throughout his tenure, he was financially responsible for restoring the Delivery Room, the Harrison Room, and the Reading Room (now known as the Roderick Terry Reading Room). The original gates from the Redwood estate were installed under his supervision on Redwood Street in 1914. And it was at Terry’s behest that in 1917 Bradford Norman, then the owner of Abraham Redwood’s historic house and property in Portsmouth, agreed to transfer the Summer house designed by Peter Harrison to the Library grounds, where it remains today. Finally, it was Terry who funded the Library’s acquisition of one of the handful of bronze replicas of French eighteenthcentury sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s famed full-length portrait sculpture of George Washington, now outdoors on the South side of the Library.
In 1916, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of William shakespeare’s death, terry loaned to the Redwood a sizable amount of shakespeare works from his private collection for an exhibition that was at the time called “the most remarkable shakespeare exhibit ever held in this country.”
It is nonetheless Terry’s role as a bibliophile supporter of the Redwood upon which his legacy should logically rest. In 1916, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, Terry loaned to the Redwood a sizable amount of Shakespeare works from his private collection for an exhibition that was at the time called “the most remarkable Shakespeare exhibit ever held in this country.” The American Art Association catalogues of the posthumous sale of his book collection attest to the superlative quality of the Terry materials displayed at the Library: first editions of Shakespeare’s Poems (1640) and The Tragedy of Othello (1622), second editions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), King Lear (1608), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1619).
The Shakespeare exhibition was the Redwood’s first devoted to rare books, and the first of many subsequent shows drawn from Terry’s collection. In 1927, the library held an event to commemorate the 200th anniversary of James Franklin’s—the older brother of Benjamin—establishment of a printing industry in Newport. This exhibit held many “valuable specimens of early Newport printing.” In 1929, Terry loaned items for an “exhibition of pictures, broadsides, maps, and letters in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Rhode Island.” A second exhibition that year, also based on loans from Terry, included “original letters, manuscript poems, and autographs of some of the famous early American writers.” In 1932, Terry loaned several valuable books from his collection to show “an example of the growth and progress of the printer,” an exhibition—Terry’s last—that was deemed at the time as “one of the most important and interesting exhibitions ever shown at the library.” Later, in 1931, in support of Terry’s special interest in the library, his wife Linda Marquand Terry “very kindly loaned a collection of handsome laces and fans.” These presentations make clear not only Terry’s devotion to the Redwood, but also his and his family’s commitment to Newport’s history and public history.
copies of the book. As a retired clergyman, Terry’s collection contained other religious ephemera, including a copy of Eliot’s Indian Bible. The latter was the first Bible printed in what would become the United States, and comprised text in both English and Wôpanâak, the language of the Wampanoag people. Both the Morgan and Brown collections included this same edition. Terry’s holdings of Shakespeare exceeded those of both Brown and Morgan: while Terry owned a 1622 first edition of The Tragedy of Othello, Morgan’s collection has no early editions of the tragedy, and Brown only has a copy published in 1630.
In the context of the region and era, terry’s personal book collection of Western literature from both europe and the Americas was of particular significance. Indeed, his collections are comparable to the vast collections of far better-known individuals such as John Carter Brown (1797-1874) or J.P. Morgan (1837-1913).
The first volume of the American Art Association’s catalogs of the Terry sale provides a telling measure of his collection: “Over half a century ago he began to lay the foundations for a private library which, during ensuing decades, grew to be one of the most remarkable collections in this country.” Among Terry’s collecting passions was also historic autographs, some still remaining in the Redwood’s Special Collections. The auction included signatures of George Washington, Rhode Island General Nathanael Greene, and “a complete set of the autographs of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence,” which included rare signatures of Button Gwinnett of Georgia, and Thomas Lynch Jr., of South Carolina. The collection also included autographs from noteworthy figures like authors Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Final revenues from the sale certify Terry’s eye for quality and attest to his indelible mark on Newport’s literary legacy: according to the Newport Daily News, the sale of Terry’s “rare books, manuscripts, and autographs” generated $167,876, or about $3.8 million today.
Michael J. Simpson holds graduate degrees in History from new York University and Brown University, and is now an Adjunct Professor of History at Johnson & Wales University in Providence. He is also the founder of On This Day in Rhode Island History
In the context of the region and era, Terry’s personal book collection of Western literature from both Europe and the Americas was of particular significance. Indeed, his collections are comparable to the vast collections of far better-known individuals such as John Carter Brown (1797-1874) or J.P. Morgan (18371913). For example, while Brown’s collection contained only one leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, Terry’s contained twenty-four leaves, encapsulating the entire Book of Genesis. On the other hand, Morgan’s is the only collection in the world to have three complete
Sources consulted:
American Art Association, The Library of the Late Rev. Dr. Roderick Terry of Newport, Rhode Island, Vol. 1 (American Art Assoc., New York, 1934).
“Folders of letters and documents relating to Dr. Roderick Terry” [1907-1932], B.102F.2, Newport Historical Society.
Mayer, Lloyd M., “In Memory of Reverend Roderick Terry,” Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society, No. 91, (Apr 1934).
Roderick Terry Collection, Redwood Library and Athenæum.
by Daniel snydacker, Ph.D.
Touro Synagogue was designed by America’s so-called first architect Peter Harrison (1716-1775), and completed in 1763 for the small Jewish community that found a safe haven in Newport owing to the city’s commitment to the policy of religious liberty. The Synagogue is considered by many to be one of Harrison’s finest designs, and it is certainly one of America’s most important colonial buildings. Between 1957 and 1963, an extensive restoration of Touro Synagogue was undertaken and led by Gerald Watland, a nationally known preservation architect and specialist in 18th-century architecture brought in by the National Park Service to supervise the work. In that role, Watland directed the two young architects working for him on the project—J. Nagle and J. Meideros—to prepare what turned out to be the first and only complete set of measured drawings of the Synagogue ever produced.
Following the completion of the restoration, Watland submitted the drawings in 1969 to the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), the pre-eminent national repository of material that documents the country’s historic buildings and designed landscapes. The forty drawings in the set provide us with a comprehensive view of the way Touro Synagogue was built, the exceptional skill of Newport’s colonial craftsmen, and of the technical and stylistic affinities linking Touro to Harrison’s other major works in Newport: the Redwood Library (built 1748-1750) and the Brick Market (1772). The drawings show how period craftsmen implemented Harrison’s neo-Palladian designs, an architectural style then popular in England, but only recently adopted in the American Colonies, and how books—such as James Gibbs’s 1732 Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture and Batty Langley’s 1740 Treasury of Design—were integral to the transmission of Palladian architecture to America. Closer to our time, the drawings also offer up a window onto the history of the historic preservation movement in America.
work laid the groundwork for most of the other early Rhode Island HABS submissions, as the latter’s photographs became part of the first HABS entries for at least sixty-nine of Rhode Island’s most important historic structures, including the Redwood Library. The Early Homes of Rhode Island was thus an extremely valuable statewide inventory that was part of the preservation impulse behind the formation of HABS, being an early phase of the on-going, long-haul effort to document and preserve the American cultural landscape and make historic preservation a high federal priority.
HABs has since grown to become one of the largest collections of architectural documentation in the country, if not the world, and one of the most heavily used special collections in the Library of Congress. the standards for documentation developed by HABs have generated a uniform, comparable, and usable resource that makes it an essential tool in telling the story of American history and in guiding the restoration of countless historic buildings across the country.
At the beginning, however, there was another agenda. Initiated as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s effort to rebuild the Depression-ravaged U.S. economy, HABS was established in 1933 as part of the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).3 From the beginning, HABS was a collaborative effort involving a wide variety of people and organizations, including the Library of Congress and the American Institute of Architects. The program was also designed to provide employment for over 1,000 out-of-work architects and photographers. Throughout its history, HABS documentation has dovetailed with the major national, state, and local preservation organizations— both professional and volunteer—and the decision to document a building has always come from both the top down and the bottom up. While the first phase of the HABS surveys ended with America’s entry into World War II, the enactment of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 marked the beginning of a new era in federal preservation programs, including the re-booting of the HABS survey at a new level of professionalism.
By a remarkable turn of serendipity, a set of these drawings— made before Watland submitted the final copy to HABS1—became available for sale at Commonwealth Books on Washington Square in Newport. In consultation with the Touro Synagogue Foundation they have been acquired by the Redwood for the Library’s Special Collections. As coincidence would have it, the building occupied by Commonwealth Books is also part of the story. Known now as the Buliod-Perry House, the building was home to both Moses Levy and the Moses Seixas family before the Revolution. Levy was one of the original contributors to the construction of the Synagogue, and Seixas was a President of Touro Synagogue and a founding member of the King David Masonic Lodge in Newport.
In fact, the drawings were not the first materials submitted to HABS for the Synagogue. The earliest entry was made in 1937 at the very beginning of the HABS program and consisted of three photographs taken by the little-known Rhode Island photographer Arthur W. Le Boeuf. His photographs of Touro originally appeared in Antoinette Downing’s groundbreaking 1937 book The Early Homes of Rhode Island for which he was the photographer. In that same year Downing was appointed to serve on the advisory committee to the Rhode Island section of HABS.2 Downing’s and LeBeouf’s
HABS has since grown to become one of the largest collections of architectural documentation in the country, if not the world, and one of the most heavily used special collections in the Library of Congress. The standards for documentation developed by HABS have generated a uniform, comparable, and usable resource that makes it an essential tool in telling the story of American history and in guiding the restoration of countless historic buildings across the country. HABS and its affiliated engineering and landscape surveys record more than 500,000 drawings, photographs, and histories for more than 41,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the 21st century.4 It is thoroughly inclusive, and its subjects are multi-cultural, urban and rural, secular and profane, vernacular and high style.5
The HABS drawings of Touro Synagogue were produced just prior to this turning point in the history of the survey in the 1960s. Watland had them done as part of the due diligence he understood was needed to both preserve and document the building and its history. Their submission to the Library of Congress by Watland reflects his understanding of the historic preservation movement at both the local and national level, and they formed a bookend to the submission of photographs by LeBoeuf twenty-three years earlier.
This pattern of HABS records being created over time applies to the Redwood Library’s records as well. The Library benefited directly from the revival of HABS, for in 1970 the National Park
Service initiated the “Newport HABS Project,” which generated materials that were contributed to existing Newport HABS records as well as to the creation of several new ones. The measured drawings of Redwood were done at this time by Thomas Sanford, a professional draftsman. An extensive series of photographs was also taken by the National Park Service photographer, Jack E. Boucher, and added to many earlier records, including Redwood’s and Touro’s. Finally, additional photographs were taken of Redwood during the “Newport HABS Project” by the internationally recognized photographer Cervin Robinson, who worked during his long career for many of the country’s top architectural historians.6
There was one more important development that appeared after the revival of HABS in the 1960s, and that was the application of digital technology to the creation of material submitted to HABS starting in the 1980s. That decade witnessed the introduction of new drawing technologies such as Computer Aided Drafting (CAD). The gradual move from hand drawing to CAD enabled the recording of large-scale structures, and traditional hand-measuring has since been augmented by digitally rectified photogrammetry and three-dimensional laser scanning.7
As part of this transition to digital technology, scans were made by the Library of Congress of many of the HABS records, including these drawings, which are now available on-line. As convenient as they are, however, our casual acceptance of the permanence, accuracy, and reliability of on-line material is giving way to some concerns
Acquisition made possible with funds from the Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg Charitable Foundation
1We know they were made before the set submitted to HABS because of internal evidence in the drawings themselves, most specifically the fact that the official labelling of the drawings done by HABS at the time of submission was missing from this set. They were, in all probability, the property of either Watland or his young apprentice, James Lee Nagle.
2Antoinette Downing is better known for her book with Vincent Scully The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1915, (Cambridge MA. 1952. Harvard University Press, with subsequent editions)
3Much of the information about the history and value of HABS is found in American Place: The Historic American Building Survey at Seventy-Five Years, the catalogue of the 75th anniversary exhibition sponsored by the US Department of the Interior Museum and the National Park Service HABS program. See p. 13.
about the stability of the internet, and these paper drawings have the added value of being a safe, backup copy, stored right up the street from Touro at the Redwood Library.
This digital technology has also largely replaced the traditional arts of hand-drawing and hand-inking. While this has made the production of measured drawings easier, many feel that something is lost in this transition. These drawings on paper were made by real people—Nagle and Medieros—and they retain the ineffable presence brought by the human hand that is so often lost to the onslaught of digital technology. Their very materiality adds to their affective power, far surpassing a digital reproduction. With now ready access to the drawings, students and scholars of historic preservation will have a direct view onto the work done to preserve Touro, the history of HABS, and the history of historic preservation in America over the last 90 years.
Daniel Snydacker, Ph.D. is is an architectural historian and formerly Director of the newport Historical society (1982-2004). He is currently working on a monograph devoted to the work of architect Robert H. Robertson
4Ibid, p. 85
5Ibid, p. 50
6See “An Eye Toward the Past: Remembering Architectural Photographer Cervin Robinson (1928–2022), https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/16032an-eye-toward-the-past-remembering-architectural-photographer-cervinrobinson-19282022
7American Place, op.cit., p. 73
the Redwood Library benefited directly from the revival of HABs, for in 1970 the national Park service initiated the “newport HABs Project,” which generated materials that were contributed to existing newport HABs records as well as to the creation of several new ones.
Shakespeare’s tragic drama Othello, set in Venice in the sixteenth century, is one of the few major works of European literature to depict a Black man with nuance and ambiguity. In fact, accomplished and worldly Black men like Othello, whom Shakespeare casts as general in the Venetian army married to a European noblewoman, were a significant presence in Venice and other European cities before and during the Renaissance. In the centuries that followed, however, the presence of Africans in Europe was often dropped from the historical record.
W hen American artist Fred Wilson was chosen to represent the United States at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 he turned to Othello, using Renaissance literature and painting to research what turned out to be a robust—but largely erased—history of Africans in Venice, a storied juncture between east and west where for centuries a cosmopolitan and racially diverse culture thrived. As a memorial gesture to these Black communities, Wilson collaborated with glassmakers on the Venetian island of Murano to produce one of the island’s signature, baroque Ca’Rezzonico chandeliers. The Redwood’s chandelier No Way But This (fig. 1) is titled after Othello’s very last line in the play when, having stabbed himself, he declares: “No way but this/ Killing myself, To die upon a kiss.” The quote Wilson selected encapsulates Othello’s desperate sense of entrapment, both by the events which provoked his murder of Desdemona and by a world circumscribed by rigid hierarchies in which being Black was as precarious as it is today.1 Moreover, in the carceral state of the present Othello’s words, and the condition of being ensnared or confined, resonate beyond Shakespeare’s text, portending histories of Black people in the centuries that followed.
to Blackness. At the same time Wilson, a consummate wordsmith, specifies the sculpture as a memorial by placing it in the art historical lineage of a memento mori, the trope of northern European painting that reminded the viewer of the inevitability of death through such symbols as a skull, dying flowers or an hourglass. Wilson substitutes the morbid Latin expression (literally, remember that you will die) with the gentler chandelier mori, his title drawing out the double meaning of mori as “death’ and “Black”. Additionally, the nomenclature of chandelier, which is a word coined in France in the eighteenth century, retrieves a long and specifically European association between light, knowledge and whiteness exemplified in the ideals and imagery of the Siècle des Lumières, that is, the Enlightenment. 3
In No Way But This, Wilson uses glass, a fragile yet incredibly durable material long associated in the Western tradition with light and transparency, as the means to interrogate the metaphor of light as truth, alongside the harmful obverse symbolism it depends on: darkness as duplicity and death.
W ilson titled his first chandelier, the one exhibited as the centerpiece of the U.S. Pavilion in Venice Chandelier Mori: Speak of Me as I Am. As in the Redwood version, the latter part of this title is drawn from Othello’s final speech, where the dying man appeals for truth and fair representation.2 Through this signal quote, the artist highlighted Othello’s terminal request to be portrayed as he was, neither heroically burnished nor maliciously falsified; nor, presumably, simply deleted. In concert with this notion, the monumental chandelier of black glass—an unprecedented color for a Ca’Rezzonico light fixture—works to “bring to light” buried histories of Blackness in Venice. The work’s subtitle, Chandelier Mori, referring to how in Renaissance Venice Africans were called “mori” meaning “dark” in Italian, emphasizes the work as a homage
In No Way But This, Wilson uses glass, a fragile yet incredibly durable material long associated in the Western tradition with light and transparency, as the means to interrogate the metaphor of light as truth, alongside the harmful obverse symbolism it depends on: darkness as duplicity and death. These metaphors, the enduring legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition, continued to dominate eighteenth-century New England, which modeled itself on European culture. Note how the two institutions of learning that preceded the Redwood in the triad of Colonial learning both seized upon these ideas. Harvard claimed as its motto the snappy “Lux (Light),” and Yale followed with the clarificatory addition “Lux et Veritas” (Light and Truth). Wilson’s No Way But This challenges these powerful visual and epistemological campaigns by creating an object of black light: a gorgeously ornate and luxurious artwork that celebrates opacity and tenebrous reflection. In this way, the artist retools the longstanding equation of light with whiteness and truth, and along with it, the arbitrary and unwarranted linkage of Blackness with falsehood.
The Redwood, chartered in 1747, is America’s Enlightenment institution par excellence: it is the sole secular cultural institution in this country with an unsevered link between the eighteenth century and the present. As such, given this extraordinary but complicated history, the Redwood Contemporary Art Initiative (RCAI) seeks to explore the double history of the Enlightenment, that is, the way in which the most laudable ideals of democracy and liberty coexisted with—or, more cynically, were a rhetoric aimed at diverting attention from—the brutal material realities of the slave trade and abject unfreedom. Rhode Island occupied a central place in this history, and the Redwood was founded with funds donated by a
man who owned nearly three hundred enslaved Africans whom he forced to labor on his sugar plantations in Antigua. In this way, the Redwood Library exemplifies this double legacy of the Enlightenment in that its noble ideas of knowledge and education (for some) were made possible by an ignoble reality of slavery and violence.
Given the U.S.’s history, Wilson’s memorial to the centuriesold Black communities in Venice is not interesting simply as an isolated instance of one cosmopolitan, multiracial Renaissance city. It points to a larger phenomenon of wholescale obliteration: an entire Eurocentric history of deleting the contributions of African history, mathematics, astronomy, science, art and culture. One starting point was in eighteenth-century Germany, when Johann Joachim Winckelmann and other early founders of modern art history and archaeology denied the profound influence of Egypt and north Africa on Greek language, science and culture, instead projecting a narcissistic image of Aryan blondness onto the ancient Greeks.4 And one place this Enlightenment history of erasure culminated is right here in Newport, RI, with the denial of the very humanity of Black persons through the institution of slavery. It was this denial that allowed Mr. Redwood to make the fortune that funded this library through the means that he did (a library built, ironically, as a Neoclassical temple whose structure is indebted to Egyptian geometry.) The systematic erasure of Black history and Black subjectivity thus forms part of a targeted Enlightenmentera effort of dehumanizing, the rhetorical process bound up with the invention of racial categories of difference, which in turn were necessary to justify the colonial project, mass enslavement, and indigenous genocide.5
A defining element of Wilson’s practice is his investment in the specific context where his work is shown, and the brilliance of his art has often hinged on simple, deft shifts of an object from one location to another.6 Precisely because of Wilson’s emphasis on context, location and the institutional frame as crucial to art’s
meaning, the Redwood was committed to permanently displaying Wilson’s chandelier here, in the US’s first public Palladian building. Whereas other iterations of these chandeliers in the US are hung in white box galleries and museums, Wilson’s original Chandelier Mori was made to cast shadows on a Palladian building: the rotunda of the US Pavilion in Venice’s Giardini (fig. 2). Not only does its installation in the Redwood retrieve some of the initial formal sensibilities of the Speak of Me as I Am installation, where shiny black glass was juxtaposed against matte white marble, baroque excess against the austerity of Palladian classicism, but Wilson as an individual was asked to represent “the nation,” at a biennale where the US represents itself to the world beyond. Othello’s (and Wilson’s) demand for “fair representation” reverberated through an exceptionally loaded context of international diplomacy, housed in an institutional architecture loyal to a centuries-old, almost sacred association between Classicism and democracy.
Given that the US pavilion was constructed in the 1930s (as a somewhat anachronistic tribute to eighteenth-century Palladian architecture, and nearly 200 years after the Redwood founders sought to do the same), Wilson’s work serves to highlight the enduring allure of Neoclassicism. But in 2023, is such continuity laudable or does the insistence on an unchanging ideal of classicism represent an utter failure of imagination? This is an image of the US that still asserts itself as a European outpost from which the contributions of African and Indigenous people, then as now, are largely whitewashed. The 2020 Presidential executive order that all Federal buildings in Washington DC must be Neoclassical in style hasn’t helped the association with Palladianism as a static architecture of white male power.7
Twenty-first century US culture, like many before it, might wish to believe it enjoys a “progression” from earlier periods of violence and savagery. Yet Fred Wilson’s nuanced practice opens up an important dialog regarding the uneven back and forth of histories of tolerance. No Way But This points to a long, eclipsed
Acquisition made possible by the generosity of: The Ford Foundation, Mr. Cornelius C. Bond and Ms. Ann E. Blackwell, Ms. Belinda Kielland, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen A. Schwarzman, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick J. Warren.
1 “Certainly, Africans in Italy of the 12th and 13th century had no more stability than they do now, so the point in the Biennale was sort of about that.” Fred Wilson in Fred Wilson: A Conversation with K. Anthony Appiah (New York, NY: PaceWildenstein, 2006): 23.
2Wilson titled his entire exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2003 Speak of Me as I Am, and the chandelier itself Chandelier Mori. But when the chandelier was exhibited subsequently, it was referred to as Speak of Me as I Am: Chandelier Mori
3The Latin word candere means: to give light, to shine, or to be white.
4For this history, se Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
history of trade and intellectual exchange between Europe and Africa which existed continuously for centuries, only to be erased, post-Enlightenment, by the invention of capitalist modernity and its key mechanism of accumulation: enslavement. Far from progress, what we see is regress, with the pre-Enlightenment world offering certain models of tolerance and cosmopolitanism that ended with the rule of Enlightenment values of reason, progress and order. Likewise, the resurrection of Neoclassical architectures of power in the 1930s, as in 2020, might be construed as regressive recursions to previous, idealized moments of total white power. Wilson’s sculpture combines a celebration of light with a memorial to death and to the repressed histories of violence and genocide that enabled the wealth and prosperity of the United States. Hung in the Redwood, beneath the streaming light of the oculus (fig. 3), our hope is that this sculpture will open conversations on a more complex concept of light as a spectrum of possibilities, and on history as rife with contradictions, blind spots and opacities.
Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Global Contemporary Art Dept. Head, Theory & History of Art & Design, RISD Curator of Contemporary Projects, Redwood Library & Athenæum5Dehumanizing, defined as the act of depriving a group of people of positive characteristics, forms the basis of genocide, and other murderous acts. See David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
6For instance, in his iconic 1991 Mining the Museum he relocated objects from the storage space of the Maryland Historical Society to the galleries, displaying two types of local woodwork under the rubric “Cabinetmaking, 1820-1960:” a whipping post surrounded by Chippendale chairs.
7For the 2022 Venice Biennale, Simone Leigh covered the US Pavilion’s Palladian façade with thatch; while German artist Maria Eichhorn’s 2022 installation in the German pavilion called “Relocating A Structure” excavated part of the current pavilion to reveal the additions made by the Nazis in 1938.
Wilson’s sculpture combines a celebration of light with a memorial to death and to the repressed histories of violence and genocide that enabled the wealth and prosperity of the United states.Fig. 3 Fred Wilson No Way But This, 2013, Murano glass and light bulbs, 70 1/16 x 68 1/2 x 68 1/2”. Photo: Alyssa Gaudreau
At or about 4pm on the afternoon of November 25, 1892, two events occurred almost simultaneously at Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s Peabody & Stearns-designed summer residence “The Breakers” in Newport. While Mr. and Mrs. Edward R. Wharton (“Teddy” and Edith) payed a social call to Mr. Vanderbilt a fire started beneath the villa’s three-story center hall in a defective heating apparatus. With a strong northeast wind, the winter weather was pronounced that week, and for that reason the fires within the house had been kept going. It is surmised that the flues were too small and the basement furnace could not withstand the strain. By 4:15pm servants in the vicinity of the billiard and dining rooms detected smoke and ran from the northeast corner of the house, across the center hall, to the music room to alert Mr. Vanderbilt. Leaving the Whartons, he stepped into the hall to investigate and saw a tongue of flame through a crack in the walnut paneling. The alarm was sounded and male servants armed themselves with fire extinguishers. Flames came from all directions and forced them back. The Whartons, Mrs. Vanderbilt and the four children then at home withdrew to the gardener’s lodge. Aided by the staff, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt made
an effort to save a few personal effects but were quickly fortunate to just escape alive. Later that evening, Cornelius Vanderbilt regretted to the press that “not a thing was saved”.
These details are dramatically retold on the front page of The New York Times and other leading American newspapers the following day. They allow for a relatively accurate reconstruction of events. But to form a visual reconstruction in the absence of newsreels, the modern researcher has but to consult the visual record preserved in the cache of period photographs recently purchased by the Redwood that formerly belonged to Leonard and Monique Panaggio, the Preservation Society, and the Newport Redevelopment Authority. Here one finds a series of rare circa 1890 interior views of The Breakers I as it was just before the fire and the visual evidence is revealing. Looking closely at the furnishings of the ground floor rooms, it becomes apparent that the flames must have shot through the great center hall travelling north to south on the east or ocean-side of the house. For indeed no furnishings, accessories or textiles in the dining room, the billiard room, the morning room or the music room are recognizable as having been
saved from the flames and reutilized by the family. On the other hand, a surprising number of items from the front (west side) of the house appear to have escaped the fire and been reused in the masonry for The Breakers II built from 1893 to 1895 by Richard Morris Hunt.
It appears from the record provided by these images that Mr. Vanderbilt and his staff worked with very limited time on a salvage operation, entering and exiting from the west side front door while the east-facing side of the house was aflame. This becomes apparent from the number of pieces extricated from the west-facing library and breakfast room. Interestingly, the original ground floor plan was reprised in the new Breakers. From the breakfast room (Fig. 1) came an Empire style circular dining table and a child’s highchair; from the library (Fig. 2) came two large velvet-upholstered high-back French armchairs, a rattan corner chair, a button-tufted velvet side chair and a Renaissance metallic strapwork-backed side chair. All of these salvaged pieces are recorded as reappearing in the inventory of The Breakers II as it opened in August 1895 and where they remain today. Thanks to the visual evidence of these archival views, the narrative of The Breakers fire can be re-interpreted anew.
This example of visual decoding underscores the historical importance of preserving photographic collections, the density of which enable scholars to reconstruct the past in exceptional detail.
Hence the import of the Redwood’s recent acquisition, a collection comprising 355 archival photographs of Newport spanning the 1870s to the 1970s. Ranging from stereoscopes views of early Newport cottages, to city streetscapes, parades, festivals, aerial views and urban renewal projects, these additional images will round out the comprehensive nature of the Library’s photography collection.
A particular and unduplicated strength of the collection is the series of photographs that traces the 1965-1969 urban renewal campaign from Long Wharf to Market Square. As generations pass, the memory of Newport’s waterfront prior to 1970 is fast receding. Such once evocative names as Government Landing and Market Square, the Torpedo Station or the Blue Moon—formerly Newport’s legendary hubs of transit, employment and nightlife— mean little to generations born after 1970. Indeed, the 1960s witnessed the most extensive transformation of Newport’s physical environment in the city’s 384-year history. Vintage views of the city allow us to consider the gradual evolution of the built landscape in architectural, sociological and economic terms. They also hint at the complex layering and overlapping of historical periods in now vanished neighborhoods. Even if this layering survives only in photos, evidence abounds regarding what might lie beneath the surface for future archaeologists.
Fig. 3 February 1965 demolition of the Goat Island torpedo station
Fig. 4 December 1966 demolition of the Boston store, thames street at Market square
Future researchers attempting to locate Market square, the ferry or government landings, or any of a variety of commercial wharves, streets, homes and businesses will find ample visual evidence in this unique facet of the collection—just one chapter of many in the Redwood’s newly enhanced and growing photography archive.
Take, for instance a February, 1965 view of the demolition of the Torpedo Station on Goat Island (Fig. 3); what was once a densely built concentration of buildings from the eighteenth through midtwentieth centuries—for long a highly industrialized site that functioned as the biggest employer in the State of Rhode Island— is for us today a contemporary resort serving both residential and yachting communities. Unbeknownst to most Newporters and visitors, beneath the surface lies layers of Colonial, Victorian and twentieth-century history, the knowledge of which is available largely through the evidence of these old images.
In a December 1966 image of the demolition of the old Boston Store on Thames Street (Fig. 4), we look east through the first hole made in the urban fabric along the west side of the street at its juncture with Market Square. North of Bowen’s Wharf, this block formerly was the transit center for naval personnel and civilian workers commuting via Government landing ferries to Fort Adams, the Training Station and the Torpedo Station. Likewise, to the immediate south, most visitors to Newport arriving via the Jamestown ferry landed at Market Square, also home to the Newport Police Department. Further north, at the foot of Washington Square, stood a series of dilapidated Colonial houses
converted via multiple additions into shops and bars. The most notorious of the latter was the now legendary Blue Moon that we see reduced to rubble in a November, 1966 photo (Fig. 5). In the immediate north-facing background, the mid-nineteenth-century brick mill that housed the Newport Water Works would also soon make way for a parking lot fronting Marlborough Street.
Future researchers attempting to locate Market Square, the ferry or government landings, or any of a variety of commercial wharves, streets, homes and businesses will find ample visual evidence in this unique facet of the collection—just one chapter of many in the Redwood’s newly enhanced and growing photography archive.
Paul Miller is active for over three decades in multiple newport restoration and preservation projects, Paul F. Miller is Curator emeritus of the Preservation society of newport County and currently serves as Director of the Clouds Hill House Museum in Warwick, RI.
275th Proclamation by RI Gov. Dan McKee
Washington Birthday salute
treasures of the Redwood: Celebrating 275 Years
Belinda Kielland, sherri Grace, elizabeth Leatherman Redwood 275th Gala
Howard eisenberg, Angela & Garry Fischer
Bob Woodward at the Redwood Bob Woodward, 275th slocum speaker
Maneuvres: Daniel Lefcourt Arranges the Trevor Traina Collection
Organized by the RCAI and drawn from the exceptional photography collection of Ambassador Trevor D. Traina, the exhibition departs from New York-based artist Daniel Lefcourt’s series of so-called Arrangements (2004/05), works that examine the processes of collecting, arranging and systemizing that underpin institutions like the Redwood. While arranging masterpiece photographs from the Traina collection that establish affinities with his own work, Lefcourt has also produced a new series of Arrangements culled from the Redwood collection.
Curators: Daniel Lefcourt and Leora Maltz-Leca
June 22 – October 1, 2023
Generously supported by the Hartfield Foundation
The exhibition introduces the remarkably well-preserved objects and custom furnishings of Clouds Hill, a Gothic Revival-Italianate mansion on the shore of Greenwich Bay, RI constructed in 187277 by Providence textile manufacturer William Smith Slater (18171882). Designed by Providence architect William R. Walker, the house’s interior decoration, done by William McPherson & Co., and it’s furnishings by Doe & Hunnewell, were never substantially altered, allowing the house to retain all of its original authenticity, not only physically, but also in the preservation of its residents’ personalities and spirit.
Paul Miller: Curator
June 29, 2023 – January 7, 2024
